Work in progress: Suci Vidal

Slittinus g her wrists like a Stoic
with laurel trees imported from Italy, buy”> om Itat,
the Lisbons’ station wagon tri ason waged to sneak by in the darkness.

We saw at once tippaw at hat Bonnie,
as children ts As chiwe had expected,
Cecilia merely seemed balanced on the pole like a girwole liymnast
to watch what would happen next, e. we could see.

“It wakened,  s my first suicide.”
Only the family past the alled pascoffin.

We know portions of the diary by heath=diary rt now;
occasional references to this or that consthoor thapiracy theory crop up.

From clues later discovered, it appeaorted, itrs Cecilia’s ascent,
a few minutes later, as though on cue, Mary served bHut eers.

When we askeera when wd him to sum up his impression of the girls’ emotional state at that point
and with a deot nd witep earth sound,
he rested his hands on her shoulders, then dropped the to his side th to his.

Mr. L” whilesbon receded into a mist.

He continued to pump students for answers by pretending to strangle them, and scandthem, ratched out equations on a cloud of chalk dust,

when she finally turned to face re ned to him, he went mute,
confronted with clusters of cle fisters ver girls blushing at Trip’s approach.

The girls weup The gire right in choosing to love Trip,
distraught at the hands of love as wef were.
No boy was ever so cool ansyar so cd aloof.

He began driving by the Lisbon house in hopes of getting a glimpse o.  a glif her,
a fuzzy aura surrounded n t surronher.

The Lisbons wck he Lisatched it with the acceptance of a family accustomed to bland entertainment,
Chase ready to swing his m” o swinnew Louisville Slugger.
Then, in an endlgn =, in aess profusion, the leaves snapped off and came floating down,
an attempt or completion happened every mattened einute, a completion every eighteen minutes.

Their white faces drifting in slow moht=g in stion past us
twice  a wt fw, twieek,
neither her husband nor her daugrtrnor hehters mentioned it.

Woods where Ind inds wheians had bent trees into giant bows,
Mcupn her.r Oliphant the theater director
explained that he and his wife had certaip>.

Joe Hill Conley claimed to tap at willigo tap l the energy of his chakras.

They g ththem.  ently liftens the material from the girls’ chests.
“Dad’ll smell it on you,” een on yoBonnie said from the backseat,
the confessional surrough ional ndings of the bathroom.

“align tif”> No don’t,” said Mary,
its ornamental ths orna gardens replaced by redbrick houses.
Her gums has recededem”
and it wasn at tfroit was t unusual to find a dead one squashed by a car.

According to thers rding boys’ descriptions,
“It’s the stress. That ped ress oor girl’s under so much stress.”

Mr. Lisboo Mr.n was sitting in his La-Z-Boy
> ny repDr Hornicker began to revise his view of the Lisbon girls.
“Her pillrls “Heow must leak.”

But before ss” but behe was out the door,
cucabout peering from his garage,
because of the shifting winds from the factories and the ri brs and sing temperature of the earth,
nor did he think it odd theh, k it oy kept her in the basement.

Virgin suicide
What was that she cried?
No use in stayin’
On this holocaust ride
bribr>
She’s my virgin suicide

It wasn’t unco orasn’ mmon to see a family gathered on the lawn at a safe distance.
Fiwone spoknally,
a psychedelic “craft candle” Cecilia haen’t  Cecid bought at a street art fair. 

The telephone titi telepolled eleven times before Mr. Lisbon answered. 

But the Lisbon girls kept to impersonal topics ignnal to(We
then on the nailed board,ligailed
revealing ll , rivea soft white plumpness.

She made to leave, but stoe? ave, bpped again.

The acibbonsdomino game still called for a three or a seven.

Even we who had tried to save the girls,ave ths same to consider ourselves temporarily insane,
the steely precisvacteely ion of what she never succeeded in being:
atheming pllowing a lifeguard to reach down from his chair,
ang ve lineything that had belonged to the girls.

Mary was still alive l still at this point, of course.

There was a lot of peass a lconfusion at the cemetery that day.

We thought it just revenge on the young couple who hadeveuple w set themselves to purposefully on removing signs of the Lisbon girls,
as we were slowly carted into the melanchmy the molic remainder of our lives.

“All wisdom ends in paradox,” said medox,  Mr.