Alisha Dietzman

SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE TELEVISION SERIES WORKAHOLICS

Who can make a smaller face?

Blue raspberry isn’t a real fruit, but it is the color of the pool in this yard.

Ok, because I think I just got like super deep into it.

I’ve shut down at least two parties by telling the same story
about consenting cannibals.

The young men sit around the pool, poor
specimens of God
knows. Azaleas crowd the yard like carved
meat on good china.

She’s got tattoos. I’m into that lately.

Azaleas can kill dogs.

I could start a fire and burn this place down.

Maybe this whole thing is a threat.

I am always trying to be cool and dramatic,
which you know nothing about.

The pool is placid as God; good
china; some dogs.

It’s almost the end. It’s Die Hard.

I’ve planned my whole life
for the moment someone asks me what I want from God:
a blue raspberry.

I will not move back in with my mom. I will sell every drop of my blood.

At the end of the world there will be at least a million pools of blue
raspberry, in factories.
God grants few miracles. Dogs continue to die.

I crawl on my stomach towards something that resembles redemption.

ALISHA DIETZMAN was raised in the American South and Central Europe. She is pursuing her PhD in Divinity at the University of St. Andrews as a US-UK Fulbright scholar. Her poetry has appeared in Bat City Review, Nashville Review, Ploughshares, and Salt Hill.