Little Black Dress
Puddled at my feet or ruched
to the waist, how easily I shimmied
in and out of you, flicked cigarette ash,
tiny embers, from your bodice, spilled
drinks like rain. You lent style, seriousness.
Unzipped in vans, nests of quilts,
Persian carpets (rug burns on my back),
balled-up skin of a selkie. Wingless, plucked,
plumed, aroma of fig pudding, squid ink.
Moths have made a feast of you.
Where is the night we slept on the beach,
the morning after, cloud-crusted, glittered
with sand. Give me back the barefoot
sky, tin bucket clattered with shells.
Julia
Latinate feminine form of Julius in use throughout Antiquity
(e.g. Saint of Corsica). Becoming rare during Middle Ages.
Revived only in the Italian Renaissance, J ornamented with foliage
and grotesques, strangled by vines. In dictionary bumping heads
with juju, jujube, juke. Forming part of adieu.
In my mother’s voice, jewels. Five letters drowning. Aromatic.
During our Dark Ages, she christens me Phony, Harlot, Bad With Money.
Says not to address her as Mother. I may call her June
or Bitch. Our battlements, our distance, inflected in clipped declaratives.
Pass the salt. As though we had never shared a body.
For years, I will not take her hand
until she is old, a ruin, who can’t remember my name.
