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Now reading
beloved, I was driving down
Girard the trolley tracks’ steel harmonics humming it was dark and in a poorly heated room north of Pine a lover waited to dismantle me Yo-Yo Ma was playing the Cello Suites again they echoed in the rib cages of the squats on 54th my thighs lace-encased glissando of black stockings the Suites begin with what the instrument can do cunning hook and eye of the garter belt progress to what it cannot beloved in the piebald park between the cemetery and the dollar store the monkey bars sang with cold Bach makes us hold one note in mind so we can hear several as though at once here on Eid you held my hand other people’s families converged and the dark tremolo of goat smoke rose sweat pressed the sundress to the small of my back beloved I listened to you wishing your mother on the phone a sweet breaking of the fast it’s a trick of the baroque beloved those old notes the mind keeps trying to hold onto before I left the house my son who is almost seventeen played me a song he wrote called Doctor Misery your baby left you he sang beloved in the illuminated laundromat on 47th the clothes rotated to the cello’s churn to a police siren’s wolf tone my own body was once so pure only one person touched it and only on Fridays so pure it spun water and fiber into gold music Ma says is not one thing look beloved inside my uterus a gear- box inside the ridges of my sex a mountain range beloved when you left it was another December you folded your many-colored scarves sealed your books into boxes now in a blank room in another city you are writing an academic paper on perfection you chop carrots into bright coins dusk’s adagio on snow outside you touch the dancer’s hip point lift that long bowed note from her mouth you told me beloved there are two kinds of perfection: order and seeing things as they are the cello constructs a galaxy of neutron stars from the flicker of light in each row house on Resurrection Blvd the well-ordered scene in the crumbling Victorian where my lover slides a hand under my skirt undoes my bindings in the body cavity it is the emptiness that makes air reverberate it is the emptiness that sings