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Poetry by Mary Klein

Plot of a Movie

Scene I: House party, balcony.    Man versus Self.   Overlooking the desert.

Shot that makes smoking look cool, maybe even healthy.
Dialogue implying a more profound connection between the two.

Drug montage in blue.

Extremely normal sex.

Cut to a single light on the porch,    framed centrally.    Illinois.

Black coffee trembling in paper cup, blood on leather boots.

Scene that glamorizes automatic weapons:

Italians versus cowboys and

Oh my God.

It’s Timotheé Chalamet!

Tender moment between father and son:    Theater bursts into tears.

                                This is what it’s all about!!!

Close-up of hands, oil paint    in the creases of his knuckles. He whispers:

This is all I have and all I ever will.” unquote

The denouement,
The crying on command.

Housewives, damsels, bitches, etc.

Moans of pleasure during fight scene and
Moans of pain during sex scene

(This will be significant later.)

Sex implied by messy hair, a perfectly-timed glance, a timelapse of fruit rot.

Death by rattlesnake.

Scene 2: Her doorstep, New England-ish.    Dead of night.

She has a stainless steel refrigerator with the ice dispenser.

How does she afford this shit? As an artist? Well anyways.

Close-up punching a hole in the wall. He says I love you and only you. I have always loved you
all along and nobody else. It was all just acting. Nothing else matters to me, not even my bitch
wife!” unquote

Flawless delivery.

Sex and guns.    Everyone is skinny.    None of these actors know what they’re doing.

Usually I can tell when a woman wrote it.

“What I do you do not realize now, but you will understand hereafter,” unquote
And the protagonist fires two bullets into something that bleeds.

[The events, strung like beads into stories, keep repeating themselves. We confuse the stories
with memories and rewrite them, over and over. There are no new ideas.

You sit cross-legged in front of the TV to listen for answers in the dialogue because everyone
else is talking over the movie, but you care about the plot of the movie. Nobody cares about the
plot of the movie like you do.

If I tell myself the story I can live: If I can show you. We’ve been here before.

Everything I do is deeply serious.]

Mary Klein

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