by Ariana-Sophia M. Kartsonis
. . . so that from winter trees, the lacemaker’s arthritic hands, x-rayed, splayed against a reluctantly warming sky, the lacemaker’s boned-fingers, the pale bark on the pale leaving-winter-tree cries green teardrops that cling to their branches like something viscious, that the down-belows take for leaves, that we know to be the coming season
. . . the Maypole we’ll slice our life-together to ribbons beneath, bury where it will grow he&she a daughter-emerging-like-fresh-flora from the womb inside the lady he lives alongside now, so many eyelash-wishes made on what turned out to be centipedes winking their way back to floorboards, to damp walls in the cellar where stored we a thousand dreams, our good china, our real-house utensils, our real-life quilt,
. . . a toaster with lines lean as a collectable car, come what May we will take those ribbons and weave them satin-bright, call the wind Mariah, the night in for supper like a good hound — look what it’s fetched — the day jubilation and hallelu when the blizzard marches out a troupe of flouncing cherry blossoms balleting in the heated turquoise sky
. . . do you read me, umbrellaed under a hot-aqua sky? To cross the stage as prima ballerina, to join the ranks in the background, to see in hand-trees a release of snow-turned-petal-turned-confetti we celebrate, though some nights find us, confetti-back-to-torn-paper, ticketstubs to the film called Perhaps though now we view Thursday
. . . and so they find us: thirsty, old newsprint in our shoes, though it’s spring and the sky’s sneeze of whiteness goes cloudily, goes petally, goes May-gone-abloom, goes girl-with-your-name, goes out to greet her public, rushes out each day to see that the world’s still there