The Inside Rots Like the Outside Rots, Which Means I Grew Up in Northeast Ohio During the Last Days of the Republic

Abstract

The Inside Rots Like the Outside Rots, Which Means I Grew Up in Northeast Ohio During the Last Days of the Republic Claudia Cortese (bio) The field sharpened into star shapes. I fisted the snowand pulled a raw hand from the hole. I wish I could say my healing is heroic. I wish I could say what he did to mewas egg-shaped and leaked yellow pus into his frying pans. Scars outlast pleasure, sing the men of Ohio. To find them,sniff the air for copper, for scabs, for factories closed three decades ago but which gifted their dioxinsto the groundwater. I wish I could say I hadn't wanted him dead. JK! The death wish was all teen me had. It tarred my intestines—each time I took a shit, hatred sludged the toilet rim bleach never touched. In 1997, my bestie Shauna called meon my clear phone exposing its wiry entrails and said He shot himself. My heart galloped with joy.Despite the economy of guilt that raised me, I felt no shame for my heart turned horse muscle. The geraniums diedwhen he took me to hell. Only a mother could save the spring but the question hung in the air. Would she save me or would she sayI never named it what you named it. Therefore, he never stole you. Once, I chugged three bottles of Boone's Strawberry Hilland woke, half-dead, in a frozen suburban lawn. Once, I spraypainted God fingered Jesus's asshole on St. Joan of Arc Elementary. Once, I atethe sluttiest lipstick I could find and Lisa Frank pink leaked [End Page 323] from my ass for weeks. If you think this poem is about rapeyou're right. I sketched the cheerleader I hated for no reason in my friend's yearbook, drew myself flying towards her.Super Claudia will tear your pussy out! I scribbled beneath her. What if instead of, There can be no poetry after Auschwitz, we say,There can be no poetry after family, after childhood, after we learn they won't save us. I knocked on the cheerleader's front door, cooedLet me in, little stick. To my shock, she said No. [End Page 324] Claudia Cortese Claudia Cortese's first full-length book, Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), won Southern Illinois University's Devil's Kitchen Award for Emerging Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, and The Offing, among others, and her poems have won awards from Baltimore Review, Mississippi Review, and RHINO Poetry. Cortese received a 2018 OUTstanding Faculty Ally of the Year certificate from the LGBTQ+ Center at Montclair State University and is the Book Reviews Editor for Muzzle Magazine. The daughter of immigrants, Cortese grew up in Ohio's Rust Belt and lives in New Jersey. A note on "The Inside Rots Like the Outside Rots, Which Means I Grew Up in Northeast Ohio During the Last Days of the Republic": "I wish I could say // my healing is heroic" is based on a Terrance Hayes line from the poem "American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins," which is in the book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins (Penguin Books, 2018): "The deeper the wound, the more heroic / The healing" (45). Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press