Thank you Editor Lanning Russell of Event Horizon Magazine for publishing this poem.




Denouement

the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.


Cinema

She figured it out finally;
It took a while to impress on herself
why she never moved forward.
Then, she saw that movie.
Her life flashed in front of her eyes
and the realization slowly dawned.
This is what I've been dealt.
This is what I must escape,
from the first time he struck
to the first lie.
Literally,
the entire scenario of their relationship
playing on the big screen.
He did not see it
as he sat beside her.
He did not flinch.
She watched him from the corner of her eye,
or perhaps he did
and was glad to be documented.
So she sat and contemplated her own scenarios
of how this movie would play out by the end:
The antagonist would surely be crushed by a bus, would fall down an elevator shaft,
would fatally choke on a sandwich
from the bistro down the street where he worked. But the ending was not satisfying, was anticlimactic. There was no denouement
(after all, it was French.)
She trailed behind him dejectedly to the parking lot (Where is that bus?)
He blipped the lock open,
she got in the car, put on her seat belt,
stared straight ahead,
already that movie replaying itself over and over
in her head,
as it would in real life.