Kiki Petrosino

I’ll conjure the perfect Easter & we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard— my pink gloves & your green gloves like parrots from an opera over the earth— We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths. I’ll conjure the perfect Easter dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon long cords of fusilli to remind you of my hair & my pink gloves. Your gloves are green & transparent like the skin of Christ when He returned, filmed over with moss roses— I’ll conjure as perfect an Easter: provolone cut from the whole ball woody herbs burning our tongues—it’s a holiday I conjure with my pink-and-green gloves wrangling life from the dirt. It all turns out as I’d hoped. The warlocks of winter are dead & it’s Easter. I dig up body after body after body with my pink gloves, my green gloves.

After a winter of gluttony & grief I'm back on plan for good this time. I’ve ballooned to a specific kind of ugly the kind you hope to hide with body spray. But it gets worse after a winter of gluttony & grief. I’ve shown up for meatballs. For lemons whipped to weeping. Now I land my balloon for the specific kind of ugly salad oil is. Happy date night, darling. Happy coconut water + nutritional yeast. After this winter of gluttony & grief spring comes, stabbing her hard stem of anger in the throat. Even garlic scapes are flat balloons, their ugliness specific as my penmanship: green tubes of spice & hate. My body speaks the ugly testament that took all winter. It says:Gluttony & grief balloon, darling. Only kindness is specific.

It's true: I have it though I hardly approve of anything it does. Supposed bend of light or smudge where two odd angles cross. I hardly see— can hardly do a thing with it. White zone of no flesh pressing into no. So low, I can’t scale or measure it. I used to think:OK! A clean sharp place to keep. Or:I'll grow a thing! to keep, for me! But no. It's just a ward to mark & mount, a loop I lope around with, so I count myself a realm of realms. I vote & vote. Turns out, we agree with everything we do, almost. We sweep the precincts of ourselves: the rooms between each rib & under them till we reach the fat red condo where our blood leans in. We live here now. Half heart, half townhouse. Come on down. Turn on that sweet TV. Our mise en place, our rugs & nooks: we’re full of stuff. We paint the furniture we couldn’t live without. It’s true at last: we have it all though we hardly know what any of it does.

You thought you saw me! But you didn't. I wear black turtlenecks. Black panties. Live in a tall cave! You don't know where my cave is. But I come out. Every day! To buy mustard & relish! See what— A man. Walking away from me. No good. Smash him! With a loud smash! Smash his metal table and cards. Good! Down in my cave. Put on my Seahawk gear! Watch Parade of Homes. Watch Ron Popeil put chicken & fishes & burgers & pork & macaroni in the same box. Hey! I can sell that box! At school. Where I smash the gym teacher in his head! I don't wear my uniform. I don't clean my locker. I don't share my lunch with the athletes. My lunch—mustard. Straight from the packet. No one sits next to me. Keep working my skills. Keep circling the word blood in Macbeth. Good. It takes days. It takes days.

We opened the door to the fairy house & took our tea on matching pebble seats. Somehow we got out of there alive though something crystalline of us remains in that dark, growing its facets. We opened the door to the fairy house at the oak’s black ankle. You asked What could happen? as you disappeared somehow. We got out of there alive the strange tea still warm in our bellies. Inside, our hosts gave damn few answers. Who built that door? Is this a fairy house? They had no faces yet. We spoke into their quince-bud ears. You wept. Somehow we got out of there alive though we didn’t quite return. Our life is different now we’ve drunk the tea. They’re alive somehow. I got us out. Why did you open the door to the fairy house?

Even at my favorite coffeeshop downtown, Redford is a hard man to feed. This morning, he picks at his Grilled Asiago Mastercrust with a slow, disdainful frown. Could they spare the fromage on this so-called "treat?" He takes a sip of hazelnut coffee, then winces delicately into the neck of his sweater vest. I bite powerfully through my Cinnamon Frenchroll:Well, if you really don't think you got enough—"fromage"—you should just go back up there & tell the girl