Lady Liar by Susan Cossette

Her dialect adapts, depending
on where she is, who she is with,
and how much wine is involved.

Was she born in Boston’s Back Bay,
or in the Bronx,
gazing at jagged potholes
and leftover fast food containers
tossed on the Brucker Expressway?

In high school, she stole Izod socks
out of gym lockers,
cut off the tiny alligators,
sewed them onto her acrylic JC Penney sweaters.

Her gold-knot earrings came from Woolworths,
coated with clear nail polish.

She learned to set a table
and write formal thank-you notes
from books in the public library.

She runs wild, in awe of the atomic tiger lilies
and black-eyed Susans
growing by the highway
on the vast Midwestern plains.

The doctor’s son grew tired of her
antiques, hydrangeas, poetry, and affairs.



Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press) Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.