James Arthur reimagines the classic monster as a fashionable Manhattanite.
—
Frankenstein’s Monster
I’m aging very slowly, because every part of me
is already dead. I spent years in the arctic, eating
seal fat and things better left unnamed, but now
I’ve got money, and a condo on the West Side.
I smell like formaldehyde, my teeth are grimy,
my limbs mismatched, but I’m happy in this place
where I’m one more person with panache
and an ugly face. I eat well. I can walk the bridge
Hart Crane walked, or get drunk, and not
conceal it. I’m not Boris Karloff, lurching
around, a mute—I hate that guy. I get laid.
Here, people suffer without believing
that every stranger should have to feel it.
The other day I walked from Cleopatra’s Needle
to the far side of the Harlem Meer, thinking
about the Rockefeller Center, and the gigantic
armillary sphere balanced on the shoulders
of the Atlas statue there. My pants
are fitted. My beret advances everywhere
like a prow. My name isn’t Frankenstein.
Frankenstein was my inventor.
***
First published in Little Star.
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