Mannequin Envy
a journal of visual and literary arts
Candida and if your body were bread? and my hands, kneading like a small cat at your belly, your poor sad gray dough, as if that were a comfort, this sense of need, this sense of a small one purring hopeful of your providence, as if inside you were sweet heat of solace, a stone against hunger, a hollow of steam waiting for my buttery knife Cold Requiem He’s rarely home before dark and this is a wet winter day. He’s turned the speakers out in the windows as if it were collegiate spring and the Beach Boys but it’s not sweet harmonies, it’s drumming iron wheels and rumbling chains. He is digging, this man who never smiles or cries is digging, elbows up and down to the thrumming, rushing to be done with it before the voices surge; I too see black capes in the rain arriving. He is burying an animal no one loved, a foolish animal dead in the street and I never thought to wonder this quarter century might he have struck it, might he have skidded so and done this thing in the side yard where daffodils were then planted new, where he planted all the dead he found left along the highways. No he was never the one to do the damage, just angry in the cleaning up, mud shaken off the spade, hands wiped, but not on his own clean clothes. |