Michelle Ortega

Michelle Ortega is a licensed speech-language pathologist in private practice. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming online and in print at Tweetspeak Poetry, Casual (an e-book), Tiferet Journal, Exit 13, Shrew LitMag, Contemporary Haibun Online, Snapdragon: A Journal of Healing, and abroad in Horizon: The Haiku Anthology.

Thirty-Third Murder

We glide down the Seine on a tourist boat, past the charred Notre Dame and her barricaded Île de la Cité, past the walkway near the river below, where weeds push through cracks, collect wind-blown litter,  where graffiti on the high wall catches my eye; a poster, not one poster but one hand-painted letter per poster: DOLORES A ÉTÉ ÉTRANGLÉE ICI PAR SON MARI; I don’t snap a shot, as if the memorial would be defiled by curiosity, and then I wonder how much more defiled Dolores can be, and remember how the jeweler wouldn’t price my engagement ring when I tried to sell it (he didn’t want to insult me), and I told him there couldn’t be anything worse than what I already suffered (he gave me two hundred for it); I wonder, can I say strangled if I survived, if someday I can stop speaking about what happened, or should I never stop because DOLORES, 40 ANS, 33ieme morte, can’t ever speak again, all the while the sun—the sun—pinks my face gently.