Last week, I read Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and made love to my lover. My chocolate is best with bitters. I have read the bitter of cupid’s point: the please of all that is unwanted. He sent me chocolates to sleep. Light travels in a straight line which I bend with my eye. Bitterly, rumours spread to the foothold and the foothills: a lamp is all you need. Let it dangle, like an ankle. Watch him walk around the pool of light, searching for your stray thoughts. I am magic; my husband didn’t find it. Yes, I remember now, he, my to-be-king, was half-way across and wouldn’t come back. It’s my chocolate. Do not eat what is bitter. Bread and cocoa are the spread of sweet darning at the heals. Lady am I, let me unwife myself. Unwanted backstage. I dare you to out me, the bitter of a sharp instep. And gasp as fish will. A dance. Do you grasp my ‘point’? Cupid’s chocolate in the bath while outside, I wait, needles dressing my toes. I read the news, eat chocolate, search for my face that isn’t there. I hear no one say my name. Not anymore. Ghosted, of course. Yes, it’s all my fault. My lover sent me roses that smelled of chocolate, half-sweet, bitter. And I wasn’t here.

Cetta Principe is a writer of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction, as well as scholarship on trauma and literature. Her most recent book, Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide (2021) came out with Gordon Hill Press. An essay from this collection was longlisted for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Award, and another essay on Medical Assistance in Dying was short listed for the Malahat Constance Rooke award. Her poetry collection, This Real, was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award in 2017 and her first book of poetry, Interference, won the Bressani Award for poetry, 2000. She is currently finalizing a non-fiction project Discipline, n.v.: A Lyric Dictionary which will be coming out with Palimpsest Press in spring 2023, and in the spring of 2024, her poetry collection Disorder will be coming out with Gordon Hill Press. “Lady Macbeth’s Erasure” is from an autofiction project titled Drama Queens that is currently under construction. This summer, Palgrave Macmillan will release of From Cogito to Covid: Rethinking Lacan’s ‘Science and Truth’, an academic project which she co-edited and in which a chapter of hers is included. She teaches at Trent university.

Image by Wesley Pribadi @wesleypribadi