Memorial Days
In the audience, very still, I’m watching.
The bodies of women.
They leaned into the volume of their own voices, and I remember not the story but the sound.
Divided in rectangles: the exterior foreground, the shaded interior of the
cattle car.
Cast in plaster, stomaches made concave, the bodies of friends.
These other closed lips of not mine.
On the other side of the fence
She said she could not say.
Later
Not the plot but the layout of the stage.
Later, by the side of the highway
My people were dying she said / as if / she said my body were dying.
Each year my new body settles into the same seat.
Watching the mouth both open and closed.
Where the wall is full of sharp holes.
Divided into rectangles: the exterior foreground, the shaded interior of the
cattle car.
Later, the bodies of women.
Where the hair does not grow back.
She said, There was nothing I could do.
Far away.
The bodies of women, slanted in their sadness.
The door slams shut behind them, just like a movie.
Sitting in the dark, it seems, the only body I have is the one I can see.
You’re thinking you know how it ends.
Pressed my face against the picture, looking in.
Would she have spoken, the other one?
Years later, the bodies of women.
Here are the photos / but you’ve seen them.
Splayed by the artist: a scene of limbs on concrete.
No, she did not say, though she said it.
How to write a long wail, leaning.
Dispersed through the mechanism, I’m thinking, watching.
The implication of the possession of a layer of warm, undisturbed skin.
There I am, waiting for the door to slide open.
Not believing that it will.
I was not the one who ran in the dark.
I did not escape through a bathroom window, she did not say, breathing carefully into my mouth.
A False Door
I and you and several snails and small spelled items.
The wall recedes into itself, sometimes, shaking night.
The rung bell of perspective erodes my limestone bedding.
The curved edge of this red bowl against my padded finger.
You, night noise.
Goodnight, noise.
Here is the wall that comes forward to present itself.
Backlit, I am gathered into sculpture
Where is the upper side of a line?
I weave you thinly.
Lidded at the edge.
To sit in front of
Like a table setting the procession of goods
To wake the lion-headed goddess
On the underside of the line, all things are possible.
You thin barricade.
Stopping where the wall stops you.
In the afterimage of yourself, a burning red edge.
Your hands bolded, fingers italic, temporarily fish-boned.
Angry head against a backlight, she the chaos in the bushes.
Spell me.
I am asleep in the day of green leaves and my mask a green beheading.
How thin is the door?
I guess, I mean
Sitting and looking up, attentive totem
I mean, I can be the totem if you want to be the worshipper.
Miss me?
When I’m not waiting?
A bowl of berries for you, but I will eat them.
You guys can stay there for all I care.
My hands are over here, very still, velvet-backed.
Empty plinth, I mean empty socket.
You can’t come in.
Laura Kochman, originally from New Jersey, currently lives, writes, and feeds her cat in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her work can be found in Bayou, Coconut, Artifice, Sixth Finch, and others. Her chapbook, Future Skirt, was released in the fall of 2013 from dancing girl press.
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