Risky Decisions Make the Best Stories
But few want to live them. Better to lie awake under a bedside lamp while pursued by dogs than feel their teeth in your calf. Better to smuggle the drugs snuggled in your vagina while in an easy chair than submit to the full body search and handcuffs, the filthy jail. The horror lurking behind the door you should know better than to open is best when your blood pounds safe in your body suspended in a hammock under the leafy shade of your own backyard. And who wants to hear a spouse’s car pull into the drive while tangled in sweaty sheets with a lover, no matter how much the plot of illicit passion may thrill? The commander who orders his squad into an ambush calls forth courage that stuns you, but you will not pull yourself through mud and entrails, explosions shattering your eardrums, the smell of cordite and blood turning your stomach. Your experience is empathy or catharsis, terror or grief, but still you arrive at the last page, The End, and can set the story down and sleep.
Mary Makofske’s latest books are No Angels (Kelsay, 2023), The Gambler’s Daughter (Orchard Street Press, 2022), World Enough, and Time (Kelsay, 2017), and Traction (Ashland, 2011), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize. Her work has appeared previously in seventy-three other journals and twenty-one anthologies. She received the 2024 William Matthews Poetry Prize from Asheville Poetry Review and the Hudson-Fowler Poetry Award from Slant.
(Photo courtesy of Michael Spadafina)
