I sift through softness,

through the pliable belly of the moon,

to find my star,

glowing like an electric song.

How many lamps are

hidden in this orbiting bed,

a million and one possibilities

in white.

Flowers coagulate in the

living room you can’t see

because I have strung ten thousand

chandeliers from the foil ceiling.

The season is polished,

a wave of salt rolls over

the soil at the other end of the street

but here is nothing but

the tang of chlorophyll and breath.

Enclosed in my equatorial dress,

I am as a letter to the star,

whose power I painted

electrical in a posh home,

mixed media mural on my ceiling,

cheap imitation regality.

The ground shakes.

The scent of salt

blossoms from the door.

Tears in my pale eyes,

petals shriveling.

And still my lights do not

go out.

Blackest black-purple

my voice returns to me

dragging shackles.

What vertebrate ghost did this?

A legacy of ice floes through

my life

High tea in hell.

They look so refined.

I close the broken window.

The wind turns back.

After the fire

ash sifts through the air

looking for something left

to land on

finds only my hollow hands.

My voice climbs over my tongue as

a weary and alien being.

My artistically rendered

silence leaks from my nailbeds.

The sky is black,

black purple,

and I am invaded.

In some paisley antithesis

to paradise

a swan defaults on her loan.

When water is rented

and love is leased,

how can we have enough

spoons to gnaw our way through

magnified day?

In the kitchen,

patience burns tea

while virtue gets drunk on

the last of my Italian wine.

The swan will not leave the bank.

Her babies are buried there.

Below an investing, rippled surface,

a fish surveys the

inescapable purveyors of loss.

The velveteen girl,

skirt of swirling fire.

While disease lumbers

through the memorial town,

and a lasting sleep

settles like dust –

She waits for a new

beginning,

one lonelier and brighter,

toast of the town

with the crusts blazed off.