Alexandra Horton
I live in a room
The circumference
Of a human fist
But the me in residence
Never answers
No matter how insistent
The inquisitor
She billows, damask,
Not quite diaphanous
Like the petal of an iris
That curious strip of yellow
The glitter of a crown
Once-adorned but now lost
I hate her most of all
The bearer of keys
Fastener of locks
There’s no persuading her
And we sit alone
Sewn into one another
Like a hem and I being
The excess
Of a partial circumcision
Cannot assert myself
As the subject
Each in our corner
Catering, crooning, crying out
In voices that lift and lower
As an organ and of a similar temperament.
I thread her hollows into the knots
That clutter my abdomen
But I cannot fill her
Just as she cannot empty me
We are spinsters us two
Grooming our hirsute armaments
As if pure bred Persians
We could not be more incompatible
Chewing on blades of grass
Blue as the portraits on China
We nod and nod but always
An eye open between us
Like an alien head dipping down
From a multi-runged heaven
To dissect the philistines caged within
mindlovemisery 