"Sleeping Around (On Dead Pablo's Birthday)"

Sleeping Around



It seems I am tired
of being a woman. I walk
the gray plastic streets, my
umbrella in hand, unharmed,
brewing my serpents and ash.
I take apart glass, rear it up,
spend another day ironing
imaginary tigers to a base
of unpretentions. I filter the water,
the water like glass, the glass
fallen apart at the axle: my
ovaries can, my ovaries can,
like a stalled engine gasping
for a break. I break apart
bread that smells like my vulva, that
flashes me signals of desire, acres
of leavened wheat in the earth
colored blend of my muscular
thighs. Would I lie
to you? Soft-spoken and de-
lyred, a veil over my mouth
imagined, too, but an obstacle.

It seems I am tired
of playing at dying at the sink
of another ides of my livid month,
my body, a breakwater, there in the
foaming sex surf. Great elephants
of men chain and lumber through
a dream of running—my caked
feet upended in the game of mud,
not quite dirt, and not quite
crystal. I walk the waking
streets, awake and clicking
my heels at the great escape.
Were I not prey I would not
pray to the idols of Paris,
to the fine hairs of Helen.
I wear my shoes down
to the holes in the soles
of this cardboard city—all
the loaves halving and cleaving, all
the ovens bursting with ribbons
of children: the winsome ones,
the winnowed whiney—all captured
in the gas, in the living
will of Autumn chased by Summer:
chaste, but for age; chased,
but for an age.

It seems I am tired of putting on
shoes that hurt me, of a
sorrowing street, a dress
where I no longer live, the hide
of something once sleek
wrenched inside-out, a vagina;
but for beauty's sake—a long
division of snake in the rattle,
a hand bag of poppies, the bright
teeth of a girl. It seems I am tired
but the sleep of queens
grips the baseboards of
poverty, opens her skirt
there to the pulsing, presses
her finger in, frightening day
lillies flouncing in a florid orange,
bounding over the fences of a range
of possibility: the heaving, the shy
one, the forgotten bitch, the
aloe ally—all these
in a civilized stroll and beaten down
to taro root, a nurturing fog
that is not me. While he
exists.


7/12/05
c 2005 by Lorrna Dee Cervantes