AUTHOR'S NOTE:

This piece is a radical distillation of a poem that is now a couple years in the making. In film theory, the “final girl” is the unsuspecting heroin of a slasher film––usually the last girl left alive. She is conventionally possessed of certain characteristics, a virginal quality being one of them. Much against my will, the poem keeps veering into a persona-poem with a unified voice and story, when in truth I’m wanting something quite messy, made of various textures, that would allow me to explore violence of many kinds. “A Theory of the Final Girl” will make up part of that whole.

BIO:

Carolina Ebeid’s recent work appears in Gulf Coast, West Branch, Copper Nickel, Barn Owl Review and Anti-, among other journals. She grew up in West New York, NJ and now lives in Austin, where she is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, and poetry editor of the Bat City Review.