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KAYA OAKES |
Koala
I was looking mean and wearing the only face I wear within many miles
range of my neighborhood, which at night becomes a grey-green shape
that walks around wearing a necklace of recently drained bottles.
This is not so different from the face I always wear, but people see it
and understand its force will drive them backwards. I think almost
every woman has it, except for female characters in novels, who
seem to
wear more complacent expressions unless they plan to wreck the
protagonist with longing. Then, they look like Ava
Gardner.
The face went on the day I met you and I have worn it almost every day
since, even though you deserve better. But you have to understand that
this is how I keep moving in a place that wants me not to move – in a
place that has paralyzed less forged expressions into ones koalas wear;
the glazed incompetence of people who lived here in the sixties, who
were scorched by choosing freely.
I use it to seal out the way people speak to me – as if my opinion
matters.
The farther I can push them, the less important what I tell them might
become. Although you deserve more, a face that lets you know
occasionally what it’s thinking, a face that broadcasts awareness of
your gestures of conciliation, a face like a woman in a novel – the
other one, who has compassion for the protagonist and maybe nurtures
him before she dies tragically, in a flame. Nobody looks like that, but
that’s the face you should look into steadily, no matter what you
broadcast back into its gaze.
Before there was a house there was a plan for it;
a sketch and an erasure, the business of hands
so tensed from constant motion they would twitch and grasp
in the first nodding of each night’s dark.
Before there was a child there was a wrangling;
a tussle on the floor, a bruise that never fully faded
but pulsed a beat or two each month, pure blue
receding into yellow.
This will be a narrative, a fix
for lungs parched dry by decades of abstracted pairings,
the kind that patch and pierce a vision
of alternations between the way we’ve learned to live
and the way our bodies wanted us to go.
On a String
A smile like cracked and dulling amber,
Footlights curling across that face.
A spine carved out of foil
No winters ever cross the planes between those eyes
no seasons but the ones you walk in;
a footfall down, a handprint
striating the glass. You make wreckage –
cosmos in your touch a little universe unknown
those fingers held could have been held
could have become habits;
crushing smokes, serrated on a string
surfaces you cross, your spine
of diamonds, your smile that everything resists.
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