The Kitchen


On the night step, each extinguished snail’s a pearl on a silver
cursive chain, something like rain

threading the concrete. The body’s
empathy: abandoning color

with winter, with night, the rainbow
it makes of limit.

Soaking wishbones in vinegar for Science, my mother’s
newly fused back exerted the magnetic

pull of damage, already beginning
the slow ascent to froth and the lace

of fall leaves on a forest floor, the girl who died
at fifteen at fifty pounds, bones nothing but brittle

webs of absence. The untraceable circle
has no circumference. Each pure moment

implodes in its passing; memory recalls only its own
kaleidoscopic rephrasing of the fragments, childhood’s

paper swan pinned in the unstable
eye of the storm refolded

into a music box where the girl is stuck back together
in the pose of art. En pointe, the body’s a needle

tracing a predestined groove each time
the box is opened to view her

dancing on a pinhead, so thin as to make room
for the rest of the starving angels.

As if the body by disappearing could become a soul.

Predictable, the elements’ reversal, the half life
of matter, entropy and the universal

tendency to retreat to a dark
interior closet as the shattering windows are swept up

into a glistening wing. Swollen
with vinegar, the wishbones became supple

as a ballerina’s arched back, a rainbow’s promise
of a future without rain.



From Burn (2005).