G-NT3806KSJP

After I’ve Taken My Elixir





I will edit the poem and then it will be done. I can decide such a thing because I have decided it. Get the picture? I will burn all the fringes and keep things neat and tidy. I will draw a great big line in some sand. Whose sand? It matters to me so I’ll tell you. The sand will be mine and all of ours except not the government’s who has never any stake in any of this. The government has never given any consideration to finality because it hasn’t had to. It says it and so it is. That’s the way this neck of the woods functions. I have to make considerations because the government won’t. But I am quite busy brewing nonsense. Some would think this makes me a witch and I’d have to agree. I go out to my fringe and burn some nonsense. I make my house neat and tidy. I use my broom to clean and also to fly away to somewhere important but invisible. I stir a big cauldron in my chest or rather it stirs itself and I keep watch. Get the picture? My potion has only just poured itself out. I am grinning for every drop of nonsense. It is all I have.





Olivia Muenz holds an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University, where she earned the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award in prose and served as an editor for New Delta Review. She is the author of the chapbook Where Was I Again (Essay Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal, Anomaly, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Louisiana State University. Find her online at oliviamuenz.com.