LITMIR.BIZ

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       centrepieces alternate roses and curly willow.

      She goes to open houses to riffle through drawers,

      to pocket tchotchkes and sniff the sheets.

      She divines meaning from the way the chairs face

      toward or away from the southern light.

      She knows these people, as she knows the ones

      on the Home & Garden channel:

      sledgehammering through walls and revealing

      their sodden, infested, but fixable souls.

      She dyes her mane with Kool-Aid, and the pink runs.

      She applies gold spray paint to her horn each morning,

      hoping to imitate the brass tusks

      on the unicorns skewered to the carousel,

      their brittle, painted smiles, harnesses

      embedded in their backs and shellacked to high gloss.

      Her horn still has the unsettling texture of a tooth,

      the suggestion of a living core, a warm and pulsing root.

      Lifecycle of the Mole-Woman

      I. Infancy as a human

      I’ve seen this waist-high grass

      and weeping tree before, in a drugstore frame

      and a Bollywood movie, the trunk a pivot point

      for coquettish hide-and-seek. On the cover

      of Vanity Fair it had a swing,

      just two ropes and a plank, a girl levitating

      on the tip of her coccyx. Poofy virginal

      white dress, elegant lipstick slash, Cubist chin,

      she had it all. Someone proposed here,

      votive candles in a heart, a flowered trellis;

      it went viral on the internet and spawned

      a thousand thousand proposals. Someone

      has decided this is a place where no one

      can be ugly, this lonely hillside that bears

      but one tree, one strand of sweetgrass,

      summer sun fixed at one low angle,

      stuck like broken spotlight. The branches

      ache to be free of their heavy greenery,

      to winter for once. Shorn, fallen and bare.

      II. A wedding

      The gatekeeper for the mole people

      peers at me over his pink nose, an intimate

      bulb of mucus membrane, a mane of whiskers:

      perceptive and multidirectional. I cite

      my poor vision, hold my hands

      in dirt-scoop formation, show off my nails,

      grown long and hard and yellow

      as curls of cold butter. A delicate

      affectation, he says, but he steps aside.

      The towers of their metropolis rise like

      a dirt-castle sand castle, musty warm

      from the inflamed earth. The black forest

      of a black forest cake, spongy peat

      that bounces back. They cannot look at each other.

      Courtship is a blind forward groping.

      The mole prince runs his translucent claws

      down the useless heavy dimpled doughy

      flesh of my backside, finds stubby legs

      coated in velvet fur: we are in love. He tenderly

      gouges out my eyes.

      III. An empty nest

      We rise from the burrow in spring,

      me and my pups, old for mole children,

      one month weaned and eager to tunnel

      out on their own, a world of infinite depth

      and possibility. In their bravado,

      they forget oxygen; they’ll learn.

      My prince makes his high-pitched yelps

      elsewhere, flushing females out

      from the solitary forgetting that makes up

      the bulk of our days. Will I recognize the tree

      by its roots? That terrible nexus

      of too many kinds of beauty. Like Bugs Bunny,

      I keep failing to make a left,

      churning the Albuquerque sand

      like a delusional gardener. I’m sure

      the desert is pretty in its way.

      IV. A retirement home

      I meet a mermaid. We commiserate,

      half-rodent to half-fish, as she hugs the shoreline

      and I hover at the topsoil, border between

      above ground and below. She says the rebellion

      has come, describes the scene for the benefit

      of my scooped-out darkness. The mole people

      walk upright, she says, a spreading pestilence

      that overturns crops and claims the upper kingdoms

      as their own. The merfolk flop up on beaches,

      undulate on unseen waves, raise tridents for war.

      They won’t accept another treaty:

       You may walk among us if you walk on swords,

       if your feet bleed, and you dissolve to foam

       when we tire of watching you dance.

      I twitch my nose to and fro. I smell nothing.

      Can’t an old mermatron dream? she laughs.

      She strokes my downy back. She concedes,

      no, we are staying in our place, as ever always.

      Stagehands

      I.

      He’ll be a real Canadian yet.

      In this toddler’s garden of innocuous nouns

      emotions are drawn in just mouths and eyes.

      Tense confusion

      makes him seem innocent.

      Unable to tell the difference

      between What did you do last winter?

      and What do you do in winter?

      he does not reply,

       I buried my wife.

      He smiles,

      thinking it is a general question,

      a test of cultural knowledge.

      And he knows this one.

      What does one do in winter

      here, where winter is a thing.

      One skis, skates, snowshoes.

      II.

      At night,

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