Advice to Kate Winslet, Who Revealed on MTV News that Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” Makes Her “Feel Like Throwing Up”
by Marybeth Rua-Larsen
This is just the beginning: the half-joke, the mini-retch
in your mouth while holding back, the “massive internal eye roll”
you can’t keep internal. When fifteen years of frustration lands,
like your handprint in the breathy fog of the back windshield,
it’s a tell-tale sign that your sweet self can be rubbed away in an instant
and you turn into the bitch everyone said you could never be
but suddenly are.
Silence the ear worm any way you can. Pop
the daily Dramamine for the sea sick and build your boat,
board by board. You don’t owe your makers more than yourself.
Celine will still live happily ever after without
your apology. She’s rested her vocal chords for months
and will soon reclaim Vegas. She has her twins to adore after
six rounds of in vitro, and she’s making millions
off that damn song.
When you’re drowning in requests to warble it
or sent to the front of the ship and asked to spread your arms wide
and lean forward, do more than decline. Paddle. Swirl your words
into the witty frenzy only you can speak. True – you’re saving no life
but your own, and little’s at stake besides your sanity.
Say it anyway. A whistle doesn’t make a big enough noise these days,
and you can’t depend on cadavers.
Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives on the south coast of Massachusetts and teaches part-time at Bristol Community College. Her poems, essays, flash fiction and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Raintown Review, The Shit Creek Review, 14 magazine (UK), The Poetry Bus (Ireland), Verse Wisconsin and The Nervous Breakdown. She is a Poetry Editor at The Newport Review, a book reviewer at New York Quarterly and was recently named winner in the Poetry category for the 2011 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition in Galway, Ireland.
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