“Dear Rue” by Margo LaPierre

August 22, 2024

Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Dear Rue” by Margo LaPierre. Due to its formatting, this poem is only available as an image.

Dear Rue

By Margo LaPierre

From the first episode you tell it straight: bipolar’s a baseline discomfort. Correction by meds taught you to seek spectral highs, the gateway not weed but prescription. Chemistry tidy as glitter bombs. You got out of rehab on summer break and going back to friends they said I thought your ass was dead. Huh. To rise dancing from a pool of vomit only to be shunned: It’s too late for you, you’re already in the hole! How even Mischa Barton said of Marissa Cooper: My character has been through so, so much and there’s really nothing more left for her to do. I’m pretty sure you’d stand with me and say, Mischa, screw you. Rue, I want to say I’ve never felt so seen on a TV screen. And I love the way you love your sister fierce. I swigged your glee when you fired rounds into a bound and blazing villain. I smelled the gasoline. What plane are you on? Of existence? I know you’re fiction but I’m grateful you exist. Here in a midnight grove where we help each other help each other help ourselves.

Copyright © Margo LaPierre

Margo LaPierre is a neuroqueer freelance literary editor and writer of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Her second poetry collection is forthcoming with Guernica in Fall 2025. She is Arc Poetry magazine’s newsletter editor and a member of the Ottawa-based poetry collective VII. She won the 2021 Room Poetry Award and the 2020 subTerrain Fiction Award and is shortlisted for Editors Canada’s 2024 Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence. You can find her writing in the Ex-Puritan, CV2, filling Station, CAROUSEL, PRISM, and elsewhere.

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