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C.
Albert Absence of Lace If I look at Irene's face long
enough, can I know her know her? A scared lizard hides in the
sepia fields of her eyes, sadness
weighs her closed lips. My father said her voice had
wings while she played piano at the
store where she sold sheet music. I imagine her singing Meet Me To-night in
Dreamland or My Sweetheart's the Man in the Moon as Sam waited to escort her
home. No one understood why she chose
Sam. Maybe he broke the rules with off-color rhymes, his stare whistled under her
dress. And she was a yellow
songbird in the yellow tree as she flew
away, leaving chords of
dissonance, her body frozen in
after-birth, her mother hysterically
screaming she hated Sam, and the baby, my father. If only she had lived, he told
me, his life would have
been completely different. Sam wouldn't have abandoned
him; caressed with lullabies, my father wouldn't have closed
into a separate universe unable to give me love. I wear a white lace scarf like
Irene's, bundled in a knot over my heart. The Maroon Field (for Beatrice) The boy who sat next to me at school was sweet as a
chocolate moon. Numbers turned sideways with playful teasing. In bloom like the
peonies I skipped through the field on my way home to Mama's teacakes. The shadowy boy who lived near
there hid in the grass
crept up behind me. Everything I learned in
school crushed under him in the maroon covered
field of his
power my suffering. The maroon was buds breaking
limbs falling bruises my chaste voice
muffled underneath. Marooned on an island and the
wall broke. Marooned with the seed and the egg and the baby inside who stole my dreams. Because the Body Collects Experience Buried in folds of grey
tissue, childhood memories spread
through her body like a ghost down to her feet that remember the weight of
pedals; the bicycle rolls back
downhill. Her older brother races
ahead. Her fingers remember the
sting of catching his football, as
if training for the Raiders. Her eyes remember watching
cartoons. Bam-Bam swings a mop like a
baseball bat. The dark circles under her eyes
remember being in the way. Her lungs remember the
burn of his hashish, blowing smoke
rings at their shrunken
reflections in the window. Her breasts remember
hiding. His pleading, "I only want
to know what breasts feel like." The greed of his fingers. Knots in her gut remember being called to his bedroom. Stacks of Playboys in the
closet. His erect penis shoots
sperm across the wall. Her gut remembers much
more than she can, warns her stay
away. Her heart contains grief of
kinship lost in a vessel tightly bound to keep from shattering. She opens the envelope at
risk– his words could be a long awaited apology or knives. C. Albert lives in Seattle, Washington where
she divides creative time between writing poems and making collage. Her poems
have appeared in various journals, upcoming this summer in Naugatuck River
Review and The Centrifugal Eye. Also, an art feature in Delirio. She has two websites,
Aerial
Dreams and Runaway
Moon. |
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