A Rose Colored Pony
by Laurin DeChae
Pink meat overdone
is ripe underneath stretched skin:
crude lines of worship
fold over the blanket that coils me like a sausage.
It smells like my great grandmother’s house
or maybe it is only because I am thinking of her
and needing to remember to prove
I hadn’t forgotten about her yet.
There’s something about things that are sunlit and flowering that reminds me of unfolding. I
remember the first time I felt like foliage. I smudged pollen on my eyelids, swept scent on my
collarbone. I prepared myself for death.
She falls, they laugh. She rocks
against polyester carpet knitting memories
with hands she doesn’t recognize.
I will sit where she sits.
Spread, I was leafy and blossoming and needing to see the sky for what it was—that dome of arched
prayer. If this is my trajectory, let the fall be full of wolves. Where I swell, you swell. Where I tense,
you sink.
How the mind loses its rocker,
how the seat shifts shapes.
Her eyes have marbled. Glassy,
they only reflect windows as she sits staring
with tissues in her sleeve and a butterscotch clenched in her teeth.
If my hands could fold,
petals would unfurl to lips,
uncoiled, a mouth breathes.
Gyroscope Review !36