Danielle Pafunda

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison


You took us out of the freezer, unwrapped, split our sticks.

We still get eventide. We still get luminescence. We get our feet caught, sometimes, in the ropey intestine of your funny little dream. You think you’ve found the sweetest hole in which to bury your craggy face, and then out pops the rabbit.

The double bunny. Its many red eyes giving you a good scorching.

Whatev, little legs. Make with the running. Up the sheets
like a ladder, everything horizontal will beckon
your wreck.




The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

We can’t bear.

Your chatter.

Any longer.

When you say no, we say now, when you say sorry, we say sack.

Hey hey.

Ho ho.



The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

We have been crammed full of your unwholesome piggeldy.

Today’s lesson, a lesson in stripping.
First you apply the glue, then you scrape the glue,
and with the glue goes your grief.

Tra-la, tra-la.

In the dander is your grief.

In the grit is your grief.

In the aching margin of your failed relationships
is your grief and your stench, but you know what is lacking?

Of course you do.

We are lacking in you.


The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

On the front page, everything has smeared.
We get no news down here, no news of home,
no news of before, no news of the new us
on the surface of things, all polish, all shimmer,
all expertly applied crease and pucker.

We get nothing but the center of each o
eaten by a worm, relinquished by a worm,
traveling from the interior to the exterior
of a worm, by way of our sorry conduit,
by way of our wish,
our sleaze and scrap nostalgia.

Danielle Pafunda is author of Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press 2010), My Zorba (Bloof Books), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press), and the forthcoming Manhater (Dusie Press Books). She's an assistant professor of gender & women's studies and English at the University of Wyoming.