#giftinspo for Cottagecore Girls
—Dispatch from Santa Clarita, California,
nowhere near a cozy forest cottage, August, 2025
Nose heavenward, ears like capsized canoes,
I unbox a silver-gray rabbit, painted to look
metal and heavy. My new useless
bookend. Plastic. Stiff and unsteady—
I would have missed it on a shelf, out shopping
like people used to do, maybe held its weight
in my palms like coins (another gesture
obsolete). It strains to hold the books up
with its chest and muzzle—how earnest it is,
how vulnerable, how easily the algorithm’s sharp beak
found me, small and soft, in Instagram’s tall grasses.
At the Museum, the Girl Imagines Married Life
—after John Singer Sargent’s Robert Lewis Stevenson and His Wife,
a dispatch from Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AR, July 2023
It’s right after they fought or shared a laugh,
the room with its grip on whatever just passed.
Unnamed and veiled, His Wife has turned from him—
What did he ask? What keeps her silent?
The frames above her (quick smears recast)
are mute as the empty hall,
flecks of light leading to rooms
I’ll never see. He looks caught, trapped mid-pace,
but nothing blocks the widening doorway. He faces me
(that careful hand by his mouth) and could speak, though
if he did— in whispers, aimed at the ground.
Girlhood as a Room Folding in on Itself
—after Jonathon Schipper’s visiting exhibit, Slow Room,
a dispatch from Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR, March 2015
I.
The woman comes back each week
to look at me, to look
at regret—that motor stuck in the living
room wall, ropes tied
to each object, spooling everything in. She
comes back to watch
what leaving does. Today, her portrait
splinters—last month, it was only
askew; the old hope chest
groans, doesn’t seem to have moved,
but her porcelain plate that hung on the wall
like a moon
is rubble, gone. Ropes smother
the secondhand couch, tighten and pull,
and have shattered Nonna’s bowl (the last
of the fragile to go).
The rug catches and tightens around
the piano’s dead weight. What’s left
is heavy but small enough to carry
in a suitcase, to save.
II.
stuck tied
to each object, She comes back to watch
portraits splinter —
hope doesn’t seem to have moved,
but her plate on the wall
is rubble,
(the last
rug catches tightens around dead weight.
a suitcase,
III.
come back look
at
what leaving does —
her porcelain moon
is gone.
Mary Angelino’s publications include Fairy Tale Review, The Southern Review, and The Arkansas International, where she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in the Best New Poets 2017, 2015, and 2010 anthologies, and her full-length manuscript has been longlisted for the Lauria/Frasca Prize, the Crab Orchard First Book Award, the Pleiades Editor’s Prize, and the Miller Williams Prize. She teaches creative writing at her community college alma mater, College of the Canyons, in Santa Clarita, California. Learn more about her writing life at maryangelino.com.
