Arielle Tipa

The continents are not countries

Smelling like mid-menstrual cycle, I hear the news echo from the kitchen:

Church buys fuzzy handcuffs for State. Fuzz color yet to be determined.

which makes me realize: I don’t remember what religion has ever done for me,

so it probably never did anything for me at all

I Google “religion”, which triggers a flash-memory of a plastic rosary bedazzled

against plaid and -

for some reason, I think of that grunge-obsessed girl I used to work with, who

thought Europe was a country

The schizoid part of me makes paper airplanes out of Stayfree pads.

But cotton and jet fuel would burn, I think –

and I’ve never seen anything actually catch fire in mid-air, except that one wish

I made for a painless suicide, one that would give me a soul without a body -

a soul who made a living stuffing rabbit hearts with breadcrumbs, hiding them in the grass for

wolves to find. They must know it’s Easter, too.

Arielle Tipa is a writer and editor who lives near a haunted lake in New York. Her work has been featured in (b)OINK, Alien Mouth, and thread, among others. She currently runs Occulum, a journal of the unabashed and unorthodox.