I
She blows through town like a fire engine. Breaking wine glasses,
eye glasses, stained glass windows. Can't find the fire.
She glides into the room in a freudian slip. Everyone notices. A few
hands clap. Her legs and face dance. The rest of her is frozen.
"What will I do now?" wailed the diamdem princess. "Cigarette butts and
donuts all over the floor. What will the prince think?" Ah well, she
thought, at least I have my work.
II
Candy lived upstairs. She worked in The Marketplace. Friday night she
stayed home with a sore throat and read The New York Times Book Review.
She self-aborted with blue-green herbs and moved back to Brooklyn. We
never knew her very well.
The couple from the phone company moved in, killing each other in hollow
rain. He threw all her clothes in the Free Box. She left him two mattresses
brown rimmed holes where they'd tried to burn each other. His face an even
ashen, large grey lips smoking a cigatette on the proch, new cowboy shirt,
after she'd gone.
III
She lives with a man and his brother. They have a child together
and call her Sunset. They tell stories about her birth.
Born under jazz lights in a carefully measured room. Mother riding
the chestnut mare home. Galloping with an important message out of
the pain. Ambushed on the way up. Arrived peeking through holes,
trying to remember.
Red shrivelled wet and moving. She cries when she sees it, knowing it
as something always wanted. Life a part of and now apart from.
She walks into the darkened room, kneels down to the sleeping child,
feels arms and legs wrap securely around her.
Bonnie Schulman