The New Car Smell, Type A

She believed you because your skin
was scented with cloves and you spoke
of wood fires, white fields and fence
wire under the snow.

"Bay window" she whispered
over the rim, under the wine
and past the Lazarus sound of jazz.

She pulled back skin from the muscle
of a smile and read the braille
of its bones to you:

"The dog is panting, panting in the room."

She believed you, though the scent was too clean
and the drift too deep. Remember how the fat flakes fell
and the scent of your wallet hung in the air
as if the seats were sacks of crackling bills?

It was as though a small shift underground
had caused a strand to appear, connecting
your hands to the handle of the world.
Your tires made sad, chirping turns in the snow
winding down on Hollow Brick road.

The next day there was a shine to you
as if the curve of that sleeping form
had kept your snake skin coiled inside her.

Ask Me Again If I Love Her

i
Face down and flattened
hemispheres of blood shine from the
tabloid slab beside a finger-
painted and fenced off alley ending
where only her feet look dead -
the rest appears to us as "resting".
This comes as no shock. It's a textbook case
of a "senseless killing".

ii
The police car turn is a high mass, high inertial
slow roll past the sprawled out sunken
cheeked man whose legs look dead but
a slow pan reveals the ribs' pale hinge
still swings, its fall and rise and so the slow
roll past his foot-flung-out from the curb
adheres to its perpendicular tangent to
this protruding member of the set "AIDS Infected"
(the dead foot still attached to a man's breathing).

iii
It's not the disappointment of the liberators
at the lack of elation in the tottering and
skeletal remaining few who drift small-smoke
from the core where a giant corpse burns or
how a few small children splash on at the
water's edge and chase tadpoles through
the murky murk, fingers bumping over the
shrapnel and bones bottom of a bomb blast.

iv
But it is Consumptive Girl. It's the way she's so
vibrantly ill, flushed cheeks, delicate limbs,
eyes that glitter like fresh cut diamonds
and this precious compliance that says "save at all costs"
because she could never be that old whore
or this flung out limb that looks dead but is still
attached to some junky breathing.

v
There are good days when she feels well enough
to be held, when she raises her two arms like a child of two,
raises her two arms in the belly of a squid whose tentacles
invade her mouth, nose, bladder and veins. Her hissing,
oxygenated smile reminds me of how airless and still the moon is.

vi
But I am a disciple of Christ. I tell her to rise and she leaps
from the roof top security herds us to. The wind
catches the oxygen tent and carries on over the downtown
core where only the man lying on the sidewalk sees her.
His lips describe an angel as she climbs higher
than the trained eyes of a Hospital Security Man can scan,
kicking her feet without fear she'll disentubate and land.

Until she comes down, I'll share a cell with the guy
who killed the prostitute (who gave the sidewalk AIDS)
because his father came home strange from the war.
They asked a meteorologist how far she might fly.
He shrugged his shoulders and said "You'd be surprised."
so my bail was denied until the dogs don't get a whiff of her
- ever.

Now ask me again if I love her.

Email: Alacrity Stone

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