It is the perfect evening for sitting in a faux
leopard chair, surrounded by velvet
paintings draped with tinsel boas of red
and silver in a room like a submarine
below, say, 50 feet of water, the ceiling
collaged with 60s
record jackets tiling one another as though,
if you were to drill
up through them, there would eventually be book
covers from the 1800s, a scrap of text
from Rome—partial and mysterious as a statue
missing its arms and head—and finally, leaves
of prehistoric plants pressed into the dark
beginnings of oil—all of this above
as the singer pierces us with discordant
octaves in front of the wooden, carved tableaux
of a white mushroom and an island maiden,
paired to the same scale, equal
in their lack of soul and dominating
a room of bodies worn like masks—how strange
that we don’t see each other’s thoughts.
(I, for example, would become an Arbus
—I mean a black and white photograph of a woman
with her head tipped back against a wall
as though some drug had melted it there for good,
looking up at the open mouth of Elvis
and covered with blue tattoos. No clothes.
A piercing in the ear-
drum from wanting to drown in the loudest
possible sound while gazing at the cheap white beads
that undulate in the self-contained and purchased breeze
of a fan, toes pointed toward the head
of a doll whose plastic face, painted to approximate beauty,
takes on, instead, an alarming
urgency as her black-gloved hands
reach out to no one, arms draped with her blonde
Saran Wrap hair. I would be bleeding in a striped way,
as though I’d walked into a barbed wire fence
and kept on going.)
I smile and pay
my money, leave, pausing by the window of a shop
next door, where mannequins have doves
attached to their heads. One wears a dress
of aquamarine. Another’s face is sculpted
into that calm sizzle impossible to reach
in such repose, her hair surrounded by garlands
of flowers and birds, a veil secured above her head
to suggest a sense of floating.
Originally published in Cider Press Review, Volume 1.
