I was a fool with a good part in a play. All I could do was prep the stage. In my set’s kitchen there had been a murder of tomatoes. Their juice and seeds pooled in the nicked surfaces. The seeds encapsulated with gel. All I could do was wipe the counters. Soaking up what my family had left. For me to eat. For me to act out. I was a fool with a good part in a play. My back to the audience who got bored and booed. I was a boat on a reef with a broken back. Who ate the tomato? My son told me to cut it with a bread knife. He was right. That kind of knife won’t crush delicate things. Pink water on the counter. Pink water in the sink. White mold grew on the stump end. Leaked rotten on my fingers. All I could do was wash against the reef as the tide came in. Waves won all the acting awards. They were so good at agitating my body. No one saw how much skill it took to portray the drowned. I was a fool with a good part in a play.

Jessica Purdy

holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems and microfiction have appeared in Gargoyle, Gone Lawn, Litro, ONE ART, Radar, The Ekphrastic Review, The Night Heron Barks, and numerous others. Her books Starland (2017) and Sleep in a Strange House (2018) were both released by Nixes Mate Books.

Her recent chapbooks include You’re Never the Same: Ekphrastic Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023); and The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), poems based on dollhouse-scale dioramas by forensic scientist Frances Glessner Lee which were collected in Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and used to train homicide investigators.

For a longer list of other publications, plus a portfolio excerpted from The Adorable Knife and published by Buttonhook Press in 2022, Murder in the House: The “Nutshells” of Frances Glessner Lee, visit the author’s website:

www.jessicapurdy.com