|
Lorraine Doran raineeday9@hotmail.com Lorraine Doran was raised by reformed dairy farmers near the Passaic River. She has been a featured poet at the Proletkult Poetry Circus and the Barron Arts Center. She lives and writes in Brooklyn. Once He doesn't think I know he keeps her picture in a volume of sonnets he reads to me each night but never lets me hold. Against the violet cover she is the color of pale sand. It's an old story right down to the apple and the much younger second spouse. I didn't get the best of him, the beau of the ball the ends of the earth search for an all blue flame. By the time he met me, he was chasing the dragon and I was on my fourth life, poisoned twice and strangled with my own silk scarf. Diamonds were mined in my name and set into silver combs for my hair an ebony windowpane. I cashed it in for this empty gothic Tudor and a little yellow lie. He loved me once, but she's rooted and everywhere as ivy climbing up my doric arch. Whenever he plays Sinatra he's thinking of their first dance and that damned shoe that fit her like wax and melted against her foot with the heat of his hand. Everyone knows her dress was a cheap knock-off that fell to pieces in the morning wash. She was just a maid with imaginary friends, but she worked it like Eliza until she had the grammar down. I'm too clean to compare with the ingenuity of poverty and youth. My pedigree traces back to three drops of blood in the snow and a rose leaf swallowed with a fine pinot noir. I've got it straight from the mirror, mirror: I am the fairest one, I am the grand prize. Old Kiss They’re shooting a movie across the street upsetting the rats, shy of klieg lights and taking up all the good parking spaces with double wide trailers. Boys in corduroy practicing air guitar power ballads between takes look so free. I walk by three times a day and still can’t tell what it’s about, except that there’s a night scene with an ambulance and a red velvet pillow on a park bench. The neighborhood smells foreign like disaster. I want to be in it. I want to have a wardrobe and someone else’s words in my mouth to be picked for the lead because my cheekbones carve the way the screenwriter dreamed they would and dear god I want a love scene that is just a kiss that doesn’t lead anywhere else. I want to be shot in black and white so my skin looks flawless. I come home heavy with Wednesday and wanting spread thin like petals on a bedsheet never the whole flower. In the mail I find an old kiss has been exalted. My kiss given months ago to a man with red hair after we talked about old lovers, out of work tollbooth collectors things that have been taken from us. I kissed him because there are no innocent kisses and no one writes good poems about the moon anymore. I kissed him because he asked me to. I didn’t have to try out for the part. It moves me like a hush moves chiffon or makes rocks slide, fragile as the red lights that are falling on it and sirens that demand no response. When I Was Alice Still she haunts me phantomwise Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes... -Lewis Carroll He liked to pose me in front of fruit trees, too. He brushed the sleeve from my shoulder, said the green brought out my eyes. I have spent my life in the leaves, a good Christ Church spinster wearing a gauze dress and May air, a peculiar combination of defiance and melancholy on my face a history littered with outgrown rabbit holes and corsets. In a moment Mrs. Cameron will have my revenge render me in silver, reimagine me a goddess. She fixes the blossoms to my hair, only shoots from the waist up. She wants the pre-Raphealite pose, not the willowy bottle blonde in the apron that could talk to cats and caterpillars. She wants to cover a more obscure song. My repertoire is deep and vast. I am the supermodel progenitor. When I was Alice I had technicolor pretty little pets, crackers to get big on, an intermission between sepia still lives. Who pushed me off that carousel? She says he stole my youth but my youth is immortal. Hand to hip I humor her. Yes, I can make that face again. © Lorraine Doran 2002 |