I Don’t Believe in Werewolves

by Christen Noel Kauffman

Jr Korpa

Yes, he was just a man, but also the sum of every florescent bulb suspended above me, harsh as the Wendy’s sign across the street where I found myself in the dumpster trying to salvage discarded chairs. I commiserate with poltergeists called down from my neighbor’s floor, the grey cat who claimed me among the daddy long legs & miniature bottles of coke. I offer her my last cigarette while we wait for the man to impersonate himself again, turn his body into a fountain where I drop a copper coin. Always the wallpaper peels to reveal more layers of paper until the plaster pulls up from the joists, pockets of chalk in the shape of every state. I put a needle through my lip, boxed dye the color of rain & still he could hold me with a bowl of oatmeal. I don’t believe in werewolves, but I believe in the way night shifts us both into new skin, reaches up for one of us to leave & the other to fall apart.

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Christen Noel Kauffman lives in Richmond, Indiana with her husband and two daughters. Her hybrid chapbook Notes to a Mother God (forthcoming, 2021) was a winner of the Paper Nautilus Debut Chapbook Series. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press), Nimrod International Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Willow Springs, DIAGRAM, Booth, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, and The Normal School, among others.