Chelsea Wagenaar

Shoulder

 

She flies south to visit me

though it is deep summer.

 

Curved in ink

up her hind left shoulder—

 

its fine filaments splayed

as though in wind-riled disarray—

 

a solitary plume.

 

*

 

Curved in ink—

needle ink. Jade ink, violet.

 

Emerald, black.

Indelible accoutrement

 

to her camisole’s silk strap,

the peacock feather’s eye

 

will not blink back.

Wielded ink, truth-or-dare ink,

 

it stalks me, brazen,

will not unmeet my shy eye.

 

I close my eyes: the afterimage

is green glare, flash of sun

 

succumbing to horizon.

 

*

 

Truth-or-dare ink.

Truth: in a tattoo parlor,

 

you can choose your pain,

tell it where to go, what to be.

 

Dare: against our mother’s counsel,

she’s new in her skin

 

for the second time,

flesh welted red and tender,

 

the hurt of what it took to arrive here—

in time, in body—

 

already vestigial and dwindling still,

like sun-blanked, rain-rinsed

 

chalk ebbing back into sidewalk,

the last blue silt carried off

 

in a sudden wind.

 

*

 

Vestigial and dwindling still,

the sear of late light solves

 

her shirt’s thin cotton

as she walks away from me—

 

a parsed wing silhouetted there,

faint as shadow, and as fixed.