Laura Kasischke _____ Miss Congeniality There’s a name given after your death and a name you must answer to while you’re alive. Like flowers, my friends—nodding, nodding. My enemies, like space, drifting away. They praised my face, my enunciation, and the power I freely relinquished, and the fires burning in the basements of my churches, and the pendulums swinging above my towers. And my heart (which was a Boy Scout lost for years in a forest). And my soul (although the judges said it weighed almost nothing for goodness had devoured it). They praised my feet, the shoes on my feet, my feet on the floor, the floor— and then the sense of despair I evoked with my smile, the song I sang. The speech I gave about peace, in praise of the war. O, they could not grant me the title I wanted so they gave me the title I bore, and stubbornly refused to believe I was dead long after my bloody mattress had washed up on the shore.