Murder Poem

Every boy I meet could be you, killer.
I’ve known since age five. I dreamt corpses
hanging from the red maple in the yard.
You put something in the trunk. It was me.

I’ll be Janet Leigh and you can wear a wig.
I will be all chocolate syrup creeping
down the drain for you. This is how it goes:
I am showering. “Don’t,” I scream. Or else

I wake to your breath on my throat. Or you’ve
been fighting with your mother. You sever
my head, use my mouth like a Real-Girl doll.
They find my fingernails and nothing else.

Your knife presses against my stomach, taut
on the spot where my boyfriend used to come.

Kristin Maffei is a poet and copywriter living in New York City. She was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Oxford, and holds an MFA from New York University where she was a Goldwater Fellow in Poetry and co-curator of the NYU Emerging Writers Series at KGB Bar. She is a copywriter at Oxford University Press and co-founder of the collaborative literary ‘zine Call & Response.