COMMUNITY THEATRE

 

as we drive into the moon
the child draws out her sounds

 

calls it harvest 

 

a heterochromatic eye
filtering the plain darkness

 

her father keeps 
another homely wife
in his own sanctity

 

the minutiae is simple

 

when it unravels
we will ring our hands
in visible breath 
and silent accolade

 

how it is always better
when she can calculate 

 

the static limit
of a reasonable collapse

 
 
 

WE SLEEP IN AMPERSAND

 

when you are awake and not awake
and calling out from my other life

 

 

a small voice in a long fall
the brief occasion of you

 

 

I am barefoot on the trailer floor
whole and moving in skin

 

 

the ache in my spine
trembling your trouble

 

the replication of lost things
the lower level events

 

I hold you near a whiter noise
than the safer place of speaking

 

punch drunk and counting
the continuity of your breath

 

 

like your toes
when you were born

 

 

 

like
the lunar motion
of us

 
 
 

HOW WE ARE DANCING FOR OUR LIES

 

there is time now
to write the names in voices

 

I was like this once

 

she wears a champagne dress
wraps mythical hysterics
below the movement of my eyes

 

deeply kind
and young 
and exchanging
a mortgage on sound

 

a plastic thumbtack
in a paper wall

 

on the county line
to songs he wrote
on a mortgage I paid

 

a champagne dress
a room of red books
a sixth bottle of wine

 

I was once like this

 

bent on bow strand 
for a neck that splits in two
a hundred years since
the thrill of spines
and the receding selves

 

“I saw you
in the corner booth”

 

sew it up with nickel strings
like a window on a swamp

 

the small precipice of lost control
where I nursed my daughters

 

we are on the floor
a second time

 

“are you dynamically opposed”

 

are you
of or pertaining to face or power
are you 
of or pertaining to force related to moment

 

are you the stretch of him
are you the hair like haystacks
are you like a body

 

“I am become
and all worlds”

 

once 
I was like this

 

in a trailer house

 

 

 
 

and in Oklahoma the river burned

 
 
—-
 
 

Jessica B. Weisenfels lives in rural Arkansas, where she accumulates chronic diseases and steals language from her children. Her work can be found in Sink Review, E-ratio, MadHat Lit, and a few other places.