(PROSE POEM)

THE DITHYRAMB

​GRACE YANNOTTA

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Viva la Vida reminds me of you. Alright, alright. A glimpse of a shrew at a karaoke bar and her white peasant skirt. The souvenirs of men with mustaches and women with hair cut short around the neck, dyed honey blonde to look natural. The soda was sour and consistently curled in the backs of throats. This was not the time for carbonation, not as rain slammed against the windows, against the porch patio, as boats slammed against their ropes with that chilly, Neptunian New Jersey rage. The shrew sings Viva la Vida. The shrew doesn’t know how to comb her hair yet and it falls across her shoulders in awkward waves -- she’s far too old for this behavior, far too old to comport herself like this, but the entertained boomers press their hands together, cardigans brushing against wrists. Because it’s the circus! It’s the youth, it’s the garden of Eden and the home of the Hesperides. Drink in her gangly energy and the naive confidence, swallow it whole. Make tee shirts out of the occasion. Put aside your petty disagreements, Olympians. Remember the way her olive-peasant shirt puffed against her shoulders, the way the beads were hanging off by their petite strings. What an absolutely pituitaric little Minerva. We could not hear a word spoken. The neon lights watched, ever omniscient. The primordial phones lingered in pockets. The minutiae regarded the little satyr girl, the little shrew and, bedecked in her pallid complexion, she reveled. Viva la Vida reminds me of you. Well, does it?

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Grace Yannotta is currently in her senior year of high school in North Carolina. She's an aspiring author and an aspiring historian and an aspiring a lot of things. She has work published or forthcoming in Dream Noir, Angry Old Man, Zin Daily, and Anti-Heroin Chic among others, as well as an upcoming astrology column in Dark Wood Magazine.