Rodeo in Reverse. Lindsey Alexander
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that fall annually and never improves
at leaf-retention, and my husband—
an invisible who may not exist in the kitchen behind me
if it weren’t for his singing.
SLEEPLESS IN INDIANA, I CONTEMPLATE THE AGE-OLD ARTS
Dog that won’t stop barking and all I can think:
I don’t know anything about stars—
not what they’re called or how they form, but how
we turn stars into stickers to surprise
our children and assure them You are better
than normal children.
On boat decks, sailors cry out Orion!
and they see a man,
but they’ve only drawn stick-figure self-portraits
of fire and longing.
I tried to sketch
my face one night with stronger brow lines,
higher cheekbones, but it was all nose, scaly
water moccasin: a viper me.
I paid someone who drew me in
red with big hair, gaunter—
the way he drew me made me
see how lonely he thought I was. I rolled
that portrait with wax paper and a rubber band,
look at it during the Lenten season.
That same spring or summer on the back of a boat, I caught a sunfish, baited him
with gum. I didn’t like unhooking him—
tore his lip. Astrologists
shape stars into fish, take cracks at
decoding futures. Palm-reading hocus-pocus:
on my hand—which is starboard,
port, and which is solar flare?
I could use that hand to throw a tomahawk
from this bed and hit neither boat nor star
from way down here,
so far from water.
My sister was young and bicycling before
she died last night
in my dream. Dreams aren’t subtle,
she’d said to prove a point.
Dreams don’t fuck around.
People in my dreams age backward—
my sister’s breasts still smaller than mine,
her legs still
longer, but I stay
my awake-age, always.
The wreck petrified
the witnesses—a woman and her child,
who both looked like me, except
they wouldn’t talk,
wouldn’t show me
the body. She had pedaled
into the road, been hit,
which the newspaper
detailed in its color pointillism
photos—my sister in chalk
outline, my sister’s bicycle
a commemorative art display in the future.
An older man had found her, had called
the too-late ambulance—
I could feel her missing
from me, and her missing felt like my face
waterlogged
to violet, so I woke.
In a thunderstorm,
in our double-bed years
before, she once hushed
me, Don’t worry,
but oh how
she kicked in her sleep.
WHAT IF THROUGH A WINDOW, THOSE ONES?
What if a person’s whole
life were looking quietly
out a window?
That’s not a new idea, but whether it’s a sad story depends
upon the view I reckon.
What if outside the windows were the ancestors
of your lover?
Outside—a slow conveyer belt,
a parade, a mugshot lineup, a reverse death
march of the ones who made the one you love.
Can covetousness break glass?
Seep through the casement like a draft or
a bad odor?
How to thank—
Do not think about the thoughts of the long-gone
people on the other side