Mira Rosenthal

When I began to write, I didn’t know

who would be waiting for it. In the window,

a curtain hangs unmoved, a mess spreads on the floor:

loose change, CDs, an unmade bed, the entrails

of night. Signs of a struggle, deserted.

Someone left traces on these cups, this carpet,

someone bled out from self-inflicted wounds,

signed his name backwards, backwards. At this mirror,

a face, a face bit someone, a world leapt

from the other side, whole, identical

but in reverse. It occupied the best

places tonight and settled back to rest,

and no one sees it’s false. Winter comes slowly,

frost pricks the window, pricks it and draws blood.

Since it is lucky you are strange and I
am strange, together we will shock the world.
Families strolling by will stare and point,
and we’ll be famous, quite mysterious.

They’ll even make up complicated plots
in films about us, all untrue. At night,
in mid-December, we will find ourselves
a hiding place where we’ll make love and have

no other worries. We were meant to meet
in such a huge world, we are singled out
by language. Stick out your tongue for me, kitten.
I’ll tell you a story. Luckily we’re

together now, but language will betray us
and kill our world, turn it to dew and ash.

And if you do exist—say it—are you not living

somewhere inside of me at times? Unfurling like fungus,

a lump, a foreign body, cosmic cancer, stardust,

from day to day, from year to year, invading

my territory, seizing land, inciting a coup

one day at dawn in winter. Then you’ll rule

with absolute power inside my body thanks to

advancements in conversion surgery to morph into

your likeness, which means nothing, right? If you exist

you are an enemy within, my own antithesis,

an agent, saboteur, and every night you ingest

another bite of me, am I right? It’s no coincidence

that every morning in the glass I see more traces

of pretense creeping in and diagnose my face

as having someone else’s features, wrinkles, grit,

a foreign sentence added, but not in my own script.

To Barbara

How lightly we live! Just beyond the horizon

an old volcano, thought inactive, lets off smoke.

They tell us time’s about to burst, same as before,

neighbors are packing, they’re closing the roads,

we wake to find signs painted on our doors,

but we keep living lightly. Time so many times

would’ve caught us but couldn’t, we kept changing form.

When time surged forth like lava, we became outlines,

when it blew up, we crawled into the earth,

when it turned trainlike, we became ash cloud,

when it turned sniper, we became but breath,

a feather above the rubble heap, a voice calling out

for the kids to come home. We’re the letter excised

from a verdict already passed. The slow dance of flecks

when furniture is moved, the joyful subsiding

of dust as it falls, we are the star of its journey.

I took a trip to Ukraine. It was June.

I waded in the fields, all full of dust

and pollen in the air. I searched, but those

I loved had disappeared below the ground,

deeper than decades of ants. I asked

about them everywhere, but grass and leaves

have been growing, bees swarming. So I lay down,

face to the ground, and said this incantation —

you can come out, it’s over. And the ground,

and moles and earthworms in it, shifted, shook,

kingdoms of ants came crawling, bees began

to fly from everywhere. I said come out,

I spoke directly to the ground and felt

the field grow vast and wild around my head.

At night three elements enjoy our bodies.

Fire, water, air. One moment you’re water

then air the next, but flame encircles all.

At night we are reduced, small bits of tar,

soot on our skins, in cups. A storm enters

the room and clouds the mirror. There are others

from far away who look on us as food,

they eat and drink. They find each orifice

and enter us. Our bodies then become

the final element of earth and turn

to ash, dust, coal, compost where insects live

and snails leave tracks you ask about at dawn.

Once, at the world’s end, I threw a stone into

the open mouth of hell; I can’t complain.