Mrs. Sartre At The Beauty College

I said to the stylist at the salon,
"All is darkness." 
From the pocket of her smock, a candle
with which she beat me about the head and shoulders.

"Behold, I give you light," she said.
"Crazy motherfucker!" 
Who hired this bitch?
Wax in my hair.
Will an indifferent Stylist mold me at Her whim?
________

for my BFF Hedgewitch's Friday 55 bash, and also for Play It Again (existentialism) at Toads. Also for day 12 of my 39 poems in 39 days.

Travel Story For Girls

I fell in love with you
in 1913,
even though
I was not yet born. (I never let trifles stop me.)

You fell in love with me
in 2016,
even though
the limits of time and death had to be bent. 

Look at all the alcohol, all the wrinkles, all the mistakes we made,
you and I, 
in different places but in the same awful ways
(only to emerge, together, shining).

Never fret, my pet.
Life's a messy business, but we
are Mistresses of the whole shebang and are not limited by the usual stuff.

Still, I am just a little thing,
a comma,
but I have curled up in the curve of your ear
this early morning,
and am whispering how beautiful you still are, how beautiful we are,
how beautiful
and sweet like a row of mock orange straight on down the line.

________

The top image is of Evelyn Nesbit in 1913. The bottom image is of a mock orange bush. Evelyn Nesbit was perhaps the first supermodel, being the most sought after model for print and billboard advertisements in the early 20th century, and she was the inspiration for the classic "Gibson Girl."  Discovered at a young age, she became the bread winner for her family and survived being courted and then drugged and raped by the famous architect Stanford White. In later life, she drank to excess as her success declined, and her life was not a very happy one, I don't think. One of my favorite stories about her was about how, when a visiting admirer kicked a dog in her presence, she gave him nine kinds of hell for it and defended the dog--she was an animal lover all her life. As for the mock orange, I find it a sweetly old fashioned kind of bush, and its blossoms are both pretty and wonderfully fragrant.

in water

I was soaking
~in water~
I must have fallen asleep
to my slowed breathing;
my slowed heartbeat;
I must have started to dream.

There was a field, a clutch of trees.
There was a retrograde moon, pale white in the morning sky.
There were stately grackles,
noisy starlings,
and a single cardinal on a mulberry branch that bobbed slightly 
under his tiny weight.

I was dreaming that I was
~in water~
I must have submerged into the pool of myself,
because then there were your slender fingers,
your hand
wet to the wrist,
stirring me and holding my heart as I spread and rippled.
__________