Days After
Let me wear this floral print and hide in the bushes
with my face on fire. Permit me this incandescence.
It was my clocky hands that held the steering wheel
as the Jeep spun on beads of water; a dark tarmac.
Whose arms held the ugly girl when the first plane
descended? Look at the pimples on her face. Peel.
The buildings burst like a ballerina out of a fire-
place so sooty & skin ashed; the onyxlung, clumsy sac.
I built a hidden altar in the lightless back-corner
of my closet. It contains red alerts & bloody feathers.
The strangers said they could feel the blast. How it
dislodged their skin, ankle open as a hymnal. That song.
Hallelujah was not the word I thought of as my dummy
corpse left the stained glass of the car in flight.
Waxy were the wings of Icarus. Bomb was the trigger
that melted the teeth or them or everything but teeth.
What bone stays in the rubble? Amber preservatives,
honeycomb or hecatomb. Which oxen knew the hundred?
The television is learning me, giving me bullet points
which I adhere to my freckles with pushpins. Droplets.
Rain is what happened most days. Unexplainable thunder.
Today it is sunny. A man I see from my window, a man
beiged in suit and skinny tie is in a window like mine.
I don’t know what he’s looking at, but he’s laughing.
| JD Scott |
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