New #Poetry by Gabriel Ricard - ​Linda’s Adventures at The International Monetary Fund

NEW POETRY 
BY GABRIEL RICARD
LINDA'S ADVENTURES
​AT THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND

Linda had finally conquered her fear
of living, laughing,
and loving,
and she had finally gotten over becoming
a head without a body
in the parking lot of the Applebee’s
where everyone from work disappeared
to from 6 to 11 most nights.
 
These things happened naturally,
Dozens of angels joined a doomsday preppers cult
as a means of protest,
and as a means of coming to terms
with the fact that Linda wasn’t that special.
 
So why did they all care so much?
 
Linda is weirdly aware of all of this.
She still says she knows what’s going to happen
on her 62nd birthday,
which is what, four years off from next week?
 
That’s also why she’s been a smoker since age nine,
or why she hasn’t used 1, 3 steak knives minimum
to kill her coworkers at the Applebee’s
behind the mall where her high school boyfriend
would shove his hand up her skirt. Always at the movies.
Always waiting four, five tries before giving up.
 
She didn’t kill him either,
but he’s still the principal at the high school
her son would have gone to,
if she had ever gotten around to being forced
to have some children.
 
Linda is waiting for her 62nd birthday,
but she also acknowledges
that even when you know everything
that’s going to happen for sixty-two years,
you still have to work through a few thousand anxieties.
 
No one tells you that,
when you’re nine years old,
hiding from someone else’s parents,
and looking for a place that will let you do that
for as long as necessary.
 
No,
no,
no,
they just tell you about your future,
and then they disappear.
 
Presumably,
they head back to being an absolutely forgotten fixture
at winter yard sales throughout Nashville, Tennessee.
 
Or whatever people like that do with themselves.
 
Linda knows a lot of things,
but she doesn’t know a thing about that.