Getting to Know You
by Lauren Swift
how much sleep do monsters need
how much food do they eat, and what do they eat
do monsters make love (do they call this sex “sowing discord”?)
how do you hurt the feelings of a monster—
and surely they have feelings—they are not soulless—
can monsters and ghosts speak to one another
I read that you can offer strawberry Fanta
to kind ghosts—is it like this with monsters, too, do the
good monsters like sweets
there probably aren’t, in the end, good monsters or
bad monsters, but monsters who might do both
good and bad, and would they, too, say that things
are just complicated in the monster-world, and how
the monster-world and this one share a fence
do monsters need to speak, do they revel in language,
do they write poems, should we ask them, should we
hear about their families, should we try to trace
the heritage of their neuroses, should we shrug with them
when the ones closest to them pointedly do not
try to understand who these monsters are, what they are
doing, what they dream, should we not share a meal with
our monsters, let them a seat at our table, make an effort
to find what they like to drink and pour it for them so that
one day they might do the same for us
how I would like to sit at my monsters’ tables,
how I would like to see them in the plain day, in the
light of their kitchens, holding sponges, tying aprons,
stirring the stew they’ve made from grandmonster’s recipe,
and they could tell me about where they were born,
the ways they have become who they are
Lauren Swift’s fiction and nonfiction can be found in Cimarron Review, North American Review, The 2River View, The Rumpus, Birdcoat Quarterly, and Utterance Journal. You can find her online at www.laurenswift.com or on social media @lrnswft.
