Tara Westmor

Lesser Muse

Like a deer, I could not leap
outside of my startled
skin. When the car hit me,
I did the unexpected thing

and began this paperwork almost immediately.
I am submitting this application
on my own behalf, which is unusual,
because I am not at all myself at the moment.

The present is an awful mess. A hit and run.
You might be more sympathetic
if the girl, AKA me, were actually a deer,
or if the girl were wearing more clothing.

I would like to be a muse rather than a woman.
Take this as my reason for admittance
into the muse training program,
I’d like to be the 8th muse: AKA Muse of sadness.

Muse that heckles lonely men after they cheat
on their wives. Muse of city development.
Muse of partially covered potholes.
Muse of the long string of gum

that connects a shoe to pavement. Dayton muse.
Muse that walks around the empty
city drinking bourbon at two in the morning
with nothing but a bra on. Muse of all partially clad women.

Muse of vengeance. Muse of murdering
the husband who said his wife
had “given all she had to offer,”
AKA she wouldn’t fuck him anymore.

AKA she was so bored of him. I couldn’t see the man
who hit me, the windows of his sedan
tinted dark, sunglasses on, but I imagine
he must have been so lonely without her.

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Tara Westmor is an anthropologist poet, raised in Dayton, Ohio. She received her MFA in poetry from New Mexico State University and is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California-Riverside. She has work published and forthcoming in Water~Stone Review, Muzzle, The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Hunger Mountain, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, The Sink Review and elsewhere.