Golden Girls as a Metaphor for How We Don’t Want to Talk About Death Which is Not What This Poem is About
Published in Stay Golden, Daily Drunk Mag Anthology
I don’t want to write this poem. Even the thought of where this might go makes me want to close my phone. But it’s just a poem so it’s innocuous, and maybe instead I won’t write about it. I won’t write about that episode where Rose and Arnie go away together, but she’s plagued by the memory of her late husband, which brings up the reality of all of the trauma these ladies have experienced, which brings up the loss and near-entire lifetimes they walked through before this golden period, which brings up the idea of life after death, which of course is a metaphor and also not at all a metaphor. But because this is just poetry, it’s all a metaphor, just like Blanche reflecting on if she should sleep with her beau laying down because her wrinkles fade, or on top so her bosom hangs down fuller, which is a metaphor for aging and self worth but with a laugh track and lightness blanketing it, so I won’t even think to write about how heavy that could go. So this poem is about nothing, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe the nothing is meaningful. Maybe it’s not about the afterlife at all. Maybe instead of some strange Christian-tinted metaphor for life after death, these moments are really about walking through the tunnels of all of the shit we have to do, all of the pressure, all of the trauma, all that we endure, and that maybe by the time life “should have” completely beaten us down, instead of being weighed by the heaviness of it all, we are transformed. Maybe the true shine of these weeknight escapes were the wisdom within, the stories acting as swords of truth—slicing and subverting the current way of living and knowing. Ending the notion of slow decay and the false myth of a life somewhere else after this body dies. Instead, maybe this is the story of Inanna. Of Hekate holding torches, of Persephone becoming queen—glowing and gold even in the underworld, shaking off ash like the phoenix, all of these moments destroying linear notions of convention and setting it all aflame, burning bright like Rose and Blanche and Dorothy and Sophia—the process of transmutation, the alchemy that turns the prima materia to Gold. The cycle from girl to mother to crone and then again to Girl. And perhaps this… this is the magic we all need.
