Three Poems
Lauren Park
skin canvas
she etches stars on her skin
and prays for the skies to soak
red, like the fever,
for true stars bleed wine-
they will photograph the evidence:
the corner chair, the tilted lamp –
the razor blade
but no one will see
past the scarlet,
the uneven hair, the muted whispers
they will only say
she is out of tune
as if the music in her hair and soul
are not born perfectly timed
but every stroke is a plea,
begging
to bury her not
in the sorry embers of tomorrow,
and to witness
why she chose
to stay broken
a girl in chemistry saw it –
saw her wrist when she reached
for hydrochloric acid.
and donated
band-aids into her locker,
those little notes:
“still here?”
the sky – her sky –
is her attorney
who, in the court of
unbidden appeals,
proclaims
tomorrow will break red
jurists mutter:
funny how blood tastes like pennies.
and ask why
she never lived
to see those inky cap mushrooms
grow on her nose
or to taste rain in a foreign land,
or to trace the lines on her father’s aging hands,
come.
come to lick it clean
the way she cannot –
a funny animal she is
with elbows folding outward
come before
the hammer strikes
for she waits at home
in her mother’s garden that
withered years ago –
where she will be buried
facing east,
where light begins,
where she grows her own flowers,
with the shiny Pokémon she never caught.
guilty or not guilty
they will have thorns
undeliverable
flies feast
on the cup of tomato juice
i left on your table yesterday
did you not notice?
i pine for redness
at the seams of your grave
some sign you have sipped life
from the deepest folds of earth
but instead,
mal-shapen regrets coil
around your porcelain skin
one i kept pristine
through the long decades
they turn around
beneath the soil
and become
fat worms,
decomposing sighs
in the untuned elsewhere
and engrave
these unspent syllables,
letters stillborn,
for use
someday,
somewhere,
not here.
but i linger
half-expecting an answer
and kick dirt
as if i could somehow
reverse decay
does the vibration reach you?
barre prayers
iv.
they were ballerinas.
toes gripping floors still warm
from the minute-ago pas de quatretrois,
one falters: wilting ankle
during her third fouetté.
iii.
they collect closer
covering down,
and once again willing
their crushed satin shoes
to bear the slackness in their calves,
and to hide the multiplying sins–
corns, bunions, blisters too constant to christen.
another drops:
her bodice cinched so tight,
it stitches quiet novenas along her spine.
ii.
now they are mirrors to each other
a demi-plié with fingertips
welded to the oxidized barres;
a sissone for all the evenings,
where they collapsed
into the wrinkled hems of rehearsal tights.
now a grande jeté for the judges
in the velvet mezzanine.
bodies mutiny against minds
each muscle firing by rote
until numbness becomes their peculiar grace.
the mirror shatters–
her jeté is a hair too early,
a mortal sin.
i.
she remains–
insteps winged just enough
to feign perfect lines,
tutu frosted like starched meringue,
legs snapped into arabesque at forty-five
they were ballerinas,
but she dances for all four now.
