I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it---- A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin 0 my enemy. Do I terrify?---- The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else, I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout: 'A miracle!' That knocks me out. There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart---- It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash --- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there---- A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. Sylvia Plath Your Blue Hour - for Sylvia Plath In your blue hour, before the world awoke, You were pristine, shining white, sharp and straight as an arrow. You wrote like never before Like pen and paper were invented just for you Just for these hours. You wrote like never before. Oh yes these poems will make your name. Forged in fierce flames, furious, fighting, frightened genius. Giving birth to immortal verse In that blue hour. In your blue hour, driven by freezing fever, You turned inside-out, spewing your ghosts across the pages. Creating a new art. Never before. Never since. Never never again. The moon hid behind a cloud, awed and afraid, watching you Creating a new art. Oh yes you have it in you. Sitting alone, abandoned, adrift in an abyss apart. Giving birth to immortal verse In that blue hour. In your blue hour, the colour soothed you, Moved you to say the unsayable, write the unwriteable. Red would have hurt you. Ghostly, he places a red tulip beside you. But the tulip turns to dust. You are too powerful for it. Red would have hurt you. Oh yes you are writing the best poems of your life. In the worst winter weeks when weather wounds without warmth. Giving birth to immortal verse In that blue hour. But later: In your blue hour, you paced and paced. Right on the edge, did you mean to do it? Making your kitchen your Auschwitz. You did it too exceptionally well this time. You gambled your life and you lost - or did you win? Making your kitchen your Auschwitz. Oh yes you did it so it felt real. It was real. Betrayed, bereft, beaten black blue, burnt to the bare bones. Giving birth to immortal verse Wasn’t enough to keep you from dying In that blue hour. I have read your daughter’s poem “Readers, ” And I have felt ashamed. I have read your husband’s poem “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother, ” And I have felt ashamed. Empathy, connections, dreams, love, aching pain for you. All of this I feel and yet: what of it? Strip it bare and all that remains is this: I am a reader. I am a dog. But still I will, Still I will sing this song: In your blue hour, when pain shrank you to nothing You created your most terrifying art ever: your death. No Lady Lazarus you, no rising from the ashes this time. But I fancy your blue hour held its arms out to you – Held you close, calmed you, soothed you, made you safe. I see it cradling you and carrying you to a beautiful place. Not lying in your chamber, your head in the oven – But riding Ariel bareback. Free, joyful, tossing your mane, your jewel eyes glittering. This is what I sing for you In that blue hour. Morney Wilson

It turns out that nothing sticks to dry paper mache. I wanted to tape a paper napkin over the duct tape to give the little tissue rosettes something to stick to, but I couldn't figure out how to tape it on. I actually can't remember which adhesive device ultimately worked, but you can see by this photo that I tried a lot of them. Scotch tape, packing tape, duct tape, book binding glue, linen hanging tape, stapler... I think it might've been the duct tape that won in the end. In case you are wondering, I used yellow tissue paper because I ran out of green. It's okay, because you never know what dirty sponges will end up looking like, so this is totally realistic so far.