Out of the stem of a flower, antique deities. You shed your skin, save the shells for yesterdays; all petal and petal you are piled of petals, left aged hours now, raucous on the raw March air in a whispered crash. You stand at the center of a wooden frame house wearing a raincoat and trilby in the evening, prepare a meal for Satie, who sits near the stove where one egg into receptacle, another spilled on to the floor, explains the forgottens and forgivings. (I am your fleshy bareness.) Engraved in a map of some Babylonian City, a naked nymph, takes your hand, recites something once preserved in formaldehyde like a brain once floating in fluid. All heavy contours and Dutch ancestry you are six clocks stacked way up, embossed on your hands, cartography of patterns in frost: a ballerina pirouettes along a telephone wire, a scream startles the shape of a woman, white gown, glowing lapis lazuli, while Robert saunters across the room, wonders of turning the switch of an undying machine that churns, churn the beginnings of a snow a few snow release the long bright silence of morning; On this obscure occasion a room full of people only needed seeping of a threaded sentence, woven in and out of bare branches, like neurons gone too quiet, sometimes I've gone too quiet for you. You egg and nest and in the distance angled boughs are thin in this light, swallow cadenza of twilight. Thin is three birds in a poem; small, black, together, sketching alchemy; while I sit to work, you are here, either way with the cloth and the shadows, I architect your absence, dress your body in it; button & stitch, the stuff that makes parentheses, with this I fill your lungs.
Lauren Capone currently lives and writes in her hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana. She graduated from the College of Charleston with a degree in English literature and creative writing, and has been previously published in the College of Charleston Magazine.