Beatrice’s Turn
My mouth feels dry.
Curved pale shells
tucked behind my head,
slush with jelly,
reverberating shades.
Around me,
the spray-painted trees
stick out their branches,
blabbering anemically
about the gap
corroding their blue dresses.
My mouth feels dry.
Under an open steel crate,
the leaves rake themselves into
neat piles:
green ones here,
brown ones there,
soggy ones stuffed over there.
Light pours on their bare stems
from deep slits—
you can see it trace the fissures between cells.
My mouth feels dry.
I pass by a window—
a black swallow sits inside,
preening her feathers in front
of a dirty mirror.
Stretching out her wings,
the room splits in two—
another carbon copy
pulls away from her thigh,
preening its tail.
A place for everything,
and everything
in its place.
Squirrels babble near my feet,
“Let’s go there!”
“I love you so!”
“Talk to you soon!”
“I love you so!”
“Call me soon?”
“I love you so!”
Tape rolls down their faces,
worn with age.
I can see your gaping wound.
Why do you rush to cover it so soon?
My mouth feels dry.
The car accelerates in the dark.
Headlights on.
Tapping my fingers on the wheel.
A clack on the street.
Hum-de-dum dumb dumb…
Stop in the street.
It’s too late.
Curved ivory all over the sink,
crimson shells littering
the dash.
Alone with the swallow,
she shows me a map
covered in highlights, tacks,
black marks tracing tracks
of microcellular cars.
She points to the city
where she migrated with her flock
every Friday night for
years and years.
A pond, an island, a sea,
so many landmarks scattered
like confetti.
Hidden in a corner,
a silver vein
decorated with pink stars,
alone in a desert,
lounging bare on the salt beds.
“Where is that?” I ask her.
She gets very quiet.
“We don’t talk about that, please.”
The sun relaxes its back,
eased at night after another day of work.
Snakes shift and shatter
around my ankles.
Standing between two tiles,
the lone painter feels self-conscious
among the classics.
My mouth feels dry.
Rubbed against the grain,
her fur blushes red.
I put up my ear—
The ocean swells:
“I want to die!
Let me die!
They’ve all left me!
They were never there at all!
The horror! The horror!
I want to die!”
To Sybil,
her skin looks like crumpled paper.
Rubbing my fingertips
against the hairs,
it feels smoother than silk.
The ivory shells litter the freeway,
each one quarantined
in its own assigned chair.
The sky rumbles.
The world turns off.
Ah, here—the remote does work:
The lizard opens its eyes.
Tied upside down
onto a rack,
they stripped me naked,
adoring all my parts.
A hundred pig masks wrapped in plastic
laugh at my hands.
The swallow stands there.
Her wings stick out under her tight shirt.
She points her gloved finger
hard at my hands.
The shock finally hits.
No one has watered
her rosy Joshua tree in a while.
She longed for the petunias to grow taller
instead.
My mouth feels dry.
I borrowed my sister’s car
and drove all night
to Death Valley,
toward a bone-white beacon
among the crusted coral.
I place my sword before its roots.
(I have nothing.)
Oh, Dante, into the glass
we do descend!
The world turns off.
Swelling up,
the jellyfish test me,
lacerating my legs.
(Faster, faster!)
The venom crawls into my heart—
the audience applauds.
Coughing and gagging,
I rock myself on the cement floor,
squinting to see the room.
My mouth feels dry.
Plates of framed silver swallows
strung together to infinity
stare back at me.
The lines gone,
the closet opens to a field
where sixteen ladies with dark brown locks
scream supine on kitchen tables
and
(my mouth feels dry!)
they sound like the ocean.
© 2016