Letter to My Coworker, Who Keeps Making Jokes About Killing Herself

Poetry by Zeke Shomler

Performative, being non-intuitive in meaning not performance
but creationary utterance, the expressive force of godliness, is therefore not
the word I want to use for what I’m saying—maybe instead existential
or molecular or something more robust like pomegranate-eating,
rope-bearing, lightning-striking-at-the-base-of-the-neck. The neck
is the hinge of the b…