Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

stone thrown inches from my face
by a lunatic caught in the act
of turning around. I was a woman
on the mouth-breather's journey
through a nightmare by the time
he confronted me, to ask me
what I'd seen in all the warnings
of his slow car driving our roads
to ash: children in the flashes
against a white tile floor,
different pinks, swatches of skin,
more like flowers than children.
What else, but make a frieze
of his butchery?
in.
You send a man I've never met
into my dreams, a sandier
version of you, so when I rise
from inside the warm water
into an embalmed dusk, I say,
"Your brother," his face wet,
head and shoulders showing,
"saved my life." Before he
can respond, the dream
is gone, and in its place
my slow mourning over you.
What are you telling me now:
that there's trouble where you are,
or that you've just come out of trouble,
for a moment, to look around?
IV.
A slate Diana overhangs
the shelf. An oval of her
pale leg shows at the hip's
straining button. A man once
breathed warm air through her
dress there, while he was breathing
her smell in, and even though this
is still life, always the thread of her
leaving the scene, fluttering with leaves,
and coming into the scene, in the past life
of a woman always setting precedents.
I haven't really known a single hunt,
she says, except the one that made
a stone of madness grow in me.
You know the one.
v.
A god loves innuendo,
and the god starlet called
every day back then.
Shouldering the phone, she said,
It's a shame to wash the dress.
Something happened to me last night.
The weather of a gothic evening blowing in,
she was too happy about his story
of a woman who is really two women,
the one who wanders the upperworld
every time he tells it,
and wears a dress that seems
too large for her,