The Fifty Worst Films of All Time
gets me thinking about all the hours I wasted
as a kid watching The Late, Late Show,
the TV on from the time we got home
from school till we went to bed.
I used to wonder why The 4:30 Movie
brought me down. Now I’m pretty sure
it was because my mother was on the couch,
inert and numb, and I was a tick filling
not with her blood but her melancholy,
because my mother had an endowed chair
in the Depression Department,
and I was quite the Rhodes Scholar
of malaise and ennui. When I want
to host a bawling bash, a fucked-up fete
for those eighteen years of living
with an abuser and his abused,
I try to lighten up by thinking about a film
titled Fire Maiden from Outer Space.
What the hell is a fire maiden?
Were my sister and I alien lady explosives,
our flying saucer briefly touching down
on the boil of our great country’s armpit?
Come to think of it, many of the fifty worst films
of all time describe my childhood perfectly:
The Creeping Terror, The Beast of Yucca Flats,
Manos: the Hands of Fate, and my favorite: Eegah.
as a kid watching The Late, Late Show,
the TV on from the time we got home
from school till we went to bed.
I used to wonder why The 4:30 Movie
brought me down. Now I’m pretty sure
it was because my mother was on the couch,
inert and numb, and I was a tick filling
not with her blood but her melancholy,
because my mother had an endowed chair
in the Depression Department,
and I was quite the Rhodes Scholar
of malaise and ennui. When I want
to host a bawling bash, a fucked-up fete
for those eighteen years of living
with an abuser and his abused,
I try to lighten up by thinking about a film
titled Fire Maiden from Outer Space.
What the hell is a fire maiden?
Were my sister and I alien lady explosives,
our flying saucer briefly touching down
on the boil of our great country’s armpit?
Come to think of it, many of the fifty worst films
of all time describe my childhood perfectly:
The Creeping Terror, The Beast of Yucca Flats,
Manos: the Hands of Fate, and my favorite: Eegah.
Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and Reckless Lovely, all from Saturnalia Books. Co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, Martha's poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, New England Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. She teaches at Bellevue College and Seattle's Hugo House.
Art: Pockets of Blood, Pockets of Ore, acrylic on birch panel, 2021 by Kelly Cressio-Moeller.