Bad Tattoo by Karen Friedland

Don’t talk to your tattooist

about suicide

while she’s injecting jet black ink

into the fragile, aging skin

of your upper back—

she will get distressed

and drill too deep,

leaving you with a permanent reminder—

a painfully-scarred tattoo

that will wake you up some nights,

making you wonder why you went this route,

at this late date,

of trying to send a mostly-hidden message

to the world—

Was it love, 

Was it fear, 

Was it middle-aged wanting?

At any rate, you weren’t expecting pain,

but there you have it.

A nonprofit grant writer by day, Karen Friedland’s poems have been published in Nixes Mate Review, Writing in a Women’s Voice, the Lily Poetry Review, Vox Populi and others. Her book of poems, Places That Are Gone, was published in 2019 by Nixes Mate Books, and she has a chapbook forthcoming in Fall 2020 from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in Boston with her husband, two cats and two dogs.