The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills S2:E21

Andy Cohen is high as shit in this one,

and wouldn’t he have to be? This is the one

where lip injections over-shadow a man hanging

himself in a bedroom merely feet away

from his daughter’s. And this is the one

where an argument over shoes weighs heavier

than a woman re-locating her jaw over her bathroom sink,

with her bare hands, to alter her husband’s handiwork.

This shit is dark;

and this silver-fox, white-toothed grinning asshole

gets away with airing this nightmare for the world

and providing brief interludes about tit jobs and

tell everyone who you’re wearing. If they were honest-

if they could be honest, they might say

that they are wearing bedazzled desperation, and

they might say that he had it coming, and they might

say that getting ripped apart and sewn back together

over

and over

again, keeps them alive.

Instead, this is the one where they pretend

to be angry with one another,

so that they don’t have to be angry with themselves.

Stephanie Kendrick is a poet living in Albany, OH. She has had the honor of being published in Women of Appalachia Project's Women Speak: 10th Anniversary Collection; Not Far From Me: Stories of Opioids and Ohio; Essentially Athens; Sphere and elsewhere. When she's not writing, you might find her working as a Case Manager for the Athens County Board of Developmental Disabilities, training Brazilian jiu-jitsu or binge-watching terrible television.