Lynn Crosbie

(The Homemaker of the Month) Ysidro calls me at night,meeya carra. his big blonde bean, and slides his moustache across my neck. he’s dark, and like I imagine his country, flat and arid, face a painted clay pot drying on the windowsill, on his lip, trails a snake with black twisted rattles. he asks me about my youth, and I tell him like the others, that they said I would never amount to anything. be cause of my size mostly, that I was a big American girl. raw and wide I sent away from catalogues, for plastic barrettes shaped like musical notes, and Cuban heeled shoes. I was dreamy too, and once painted my naked body like a guitar, with metal frets and silver strings. he caught lizards and tamed them, and saw an orange blister ripped sun. its aurora looked liked yellow music, and his eyes narrow as he plucks it from my stomach. I had Matthew from the first marriage, when I was sixteen. we would huddle in a striped mattress that was split in the seams, and I thought of my husband as a cowboy, when his leather face creased and stretched. in college I later learned about kings, and ancient gods who sent their love in showers of coins, golden, manna from heaven. and I never talk about my first man, except to say that he laid my head open and the scar-line is his illegible signature. my son is more like an immaculate conception, like my adopted girls whose teeth and pupils are shaped like a stranger. we ride to the lake and crush bread for the birds. I like the geese with their masks and giraffe necks. sometimes they hiss and you’d swear they had a row of devil fangs under their poniard tongues. but especially the swans, I can’t help but think of them plucked and fleshy turning white and velvet, like my husband pulling his hands through my henna hair. Ysidro is a groundskeeper and gravedigger. sometimes we joke about dead business or a certain shift, and we laughed about the recipe I have included; Mexican Chicken Bake, we said: cremate a handful of skinny bones, and sprinkle lightly over the dinner table. but it’s peaceful work, and he rests by the tombs, and weeds the paupers’ wooden crosses. and tells them about the weather, and here in Oskaloosa it couldn’t be finer. I am alone most nights when he walks with sleeping Iowa, and my imagination can turn black. I think of sewing him a pole-bag, with cobra skin and vegetable powder. with fathers and half shells. so he can speak melodic incantations and command a blood- less multitude. scary corpses turn to me, their eye sockets contracting in the light. we feed the birds and cook a chicken. in a taco shell it’s perfect, spicy and delicious, like my sweet Spanish lover’s touch.

Make your mind what you want it to be. —Curtis Mayfield Tired of waiting for him, I think of a plan to stick it to the Man—he waylaid me with promises: protection, his valuable keys. Nights of seduction, I would glide to the curb in my customized Eldorado, black finish and cool bubble top and turn it over to a superyoung girl with rags and a bucket of soapy water, with a smile and a dead president,make it shine my sister. He is inside listening to Curtis, his sapphire ring he brings the moon with him, this cat, and his eyes glow like mellow stones at my superfly threads. The cashmere white stitched suit, the maxi coat trimmed in fox fur:vixen, my pretty little hat with three blue feather plumes. I let him dig me for a while, and lay a kiss, a spoon of cocaine on him, our secret meetings a potent rush and I am hip to the hit to his fly hand on my thigh, my ladies scatter in a cloud of Opium and he tells me, you know me, I’m your friend. I thought he was my man—I flash on him in the bathtub, its ledge of oils in flasks, pulling a loofah sponge over my tired shoulders, passing a reefer in lemon paper, on all the tired bitches working his keys, hustling his diamond rocks— two sets of false eyelashes, micro minis, freezing their asses off. My .25 Beretta can’t stop him, it’s not real, I’m not real to him. He’ll use me up and kill me; I need brains guts and cool; I put fur on your back, my baby, he says. I am between him and death,the greatest high of all, and I ask him to step outside. The pink flakes blow my mind and I turn to him with a flurry of karate kicks, kicking out my left leg I bring him to the ground and with my foot on the collar of his mohair suit I tell him, I took your money and signed a contract on you:I hired the best killers there are— men like you—yeah, if one hair on my gorgeous head is harmed, it’s all over for you. It’s all over for you, I think, as I imagine I am Superfly; my mind is what I want it to be, the Man is tired and suddenly he looks old, very, very old as he turns away from me, the things he cannot dream— my brazen plans, my body full of love.

for Mark and Debra: Malleus Maleficarum The ground was never recovered, nor the legions, for their numbers were thought so ill omened that they never again appear in the army lists. —J. M. Roberts It begins with Diane—the gold shingles of her razored hair alight in the wind that whips the trees, the cotton slips pinned to nylon lines: these improbable ghosts. The first I ever loved can still incite such desperation. Betrayal lashes the careful stitches, the slight fabric; its design undone. She would take her switchblade and cut spiders in half— a quadrant of scars radiating from her wrists and elbows, she wrote my name in blood, let matches flare against the cuts small yellow head, searing. I used to operate on myself, she said. Separate a triangle of skin and place objects—silver pin heads, glass beads    close to the bone. A private surgical kit, embroidery scissors, alcohol, fine needles, and violet thread; silk, cat whiskers tied in complicated bows. She remembers this way, where things are where they are buried. We studied history together, this is how we met. Recovering the Roman Empire; she draws military disasters in her margins, mail clad horsemen pitching violently to the ground, the movement of the cavalry a swarm of locusts. Her silver compact slit open, because there are assassins in the narrow hallway; her fine pale feet turn to form an arabesque (a delicate design of flowers, leaves), furrows in the sheets and mattress, pearls. Ropes of black pearls and a black rubber dress—submerged in the green haze, the depths of a nightclub, listening. Submission; she hit his thighs with a chain, a hook in his mouth her lips were alluring. Red feather quills, bright red flies. I think of him, brought violently to the surface, his tensile body still below the thin edge of the filleting knife his slick flesh streaming as he surrenders—a ceremony of scales and gills, useless to him now, as he breathes in and out. She told me once that she was like a scorpion, and I did not listen. I let her creep between my fingers, and danger was exotic to me then. I lived somewhere deep beyond the coastline, in the crevices of rocks and wood planks, her gold hair spins like loose coins, strange and valuable. The currency of nightmares, where the sun burns the earth and empties the seas—there are skeletons, gingerly reaching for night night will fall in a rustle of wings, the gentle sweep of the legs of scorpions.

I would give my husband drawings for grocery lists, with smiling faces on the eggs, and spider feet dangling everywhere. I could draw letters too. fat senseless alphabets, lexical landscapes of pointed trees and bloated clouds. that is how I wished words were, with changing colours and feathers in their spines. on road signs in my dreams, they shimmied, their Rockette heels a variegated sunburst. unlike the stiff black knots and stakes that glared at me from envelopes and books. an unchanging and cruel exotica, like smelling Cuban cigars wherever you go or the same screaming opera. he said that I did not need to learn with him there, reading slowly aloud, but sometimes in silence. that drove me insane, he would laugh or frown at something on the page, and look as if he were a creeping vine on a tombstone, a coffee stain on a piece of clean manilla. I practice learning on a stack of mail he kept in his sock drawer, and I finally learned dear. Dear Hank, it felt like having a perfume sample fall from a magazine in a sweet sudden breath. it made me think of velvet antlers, of his rumpled cardigan sweater and my love for him, a word which slayed me, with its clean lines and quick exhalation, the swelling heart in its middle. I began to scream things all day long, and I felt the first affection for poetry through the ringing sounds of advertisements, soapbox labels and advice to the lovelorn columns. words were heroic, huge killing things, and they beat in my head and bled from my eyes and fingers. I would be ironing, and a giant phrase or comma would barrel into the room, its veins bulging, its arms around my waist. Dear Hank, I miss you especially your sexy hands, mine clenched when I got that far and then some. then I knew for sure that reading was magic, it conjured up these long eyelashes and white Harlow hair, and the guilty baldspot and shaking dewlap of my faithless husband, adrift on the libretto of his private life. he would still read to me in his annoying way while I squirmed on my novels and texts, that lay under the couch cushions like misplaced scissors. I drew him an elaborate list one day, of pink champagne bottles and support girdles, and wrote my first words. I left them with his letters, on the back of our marriage certificate, I think they were my finest, I said, Dear Hank, the end. and right away began working on a longer book.

Where we almost, nay more than married are. —John Donne Pearl egg of fly intimates the curve of larva, its spine and claw point. The cellophane shell, brittle pupa blanket where the almost fly lies like a spring. Coiled and tensile, its exertions will tear the sheet. Six black legs flutter against the dry christening gown, I see his lambent eyes cloistered in these living walls of jet. Small glider, his veined wings are sheer parasols, gauzy skirts that admit the light. The orange down of his pelvis beneath this architecture, blood is the adhesive fastening flight, my sleek aviator presses his sucker feet to my lips. How little he denies me, the drone in my ear and he swarms my heart if one two light steps from the tips of my fingers he bows his head and makes a violin, or hovers behind me when I circle the floor, lonely, he rests on shoulder, elbow, to stare at me with swollen eyes, darkling, drop of ink. A currant in the sugar dish, he models in the painted flowers, black eye of Susan, blunt thorn—he delights in my decadence, the slippery floor, tiles, and stairs haunted with illness: my sensual life and his intersect. He comes on the wing of another spring, in slicks of grey water, the pendant sun. to navigate what is unknown to me, patiently, he regards the chrysalis of skin that envelops the arched veins. Incurious and constant, he is used to waiting for the modest blush, the rustle of disrobing the hush. Of silks unfolding, of gossamer veils drawn as tenderly as breath, from the fluent sea of one blood made of two, the sweetness of his pestilent kiss.

Hef brings me flowers tiger lilies, ochre veined downcast, sleek black cups small shadows, are the puckers in his pyjamas where his skin caves in tired profligate, I sigh and pour the oil along your circular sheets thinking of all the times, or women on this bed glossy old bunnies I imagine their breasts, plate of fried eggs, a row of tonsured monks’ heads his tongue slithers, gaunt voluptuary, ugly old man, my eyes close when I roll his name Ner. along my tongue, like the line of cold test tubes thin bottled semen, he wants to plant it, deeply in my flat belly Hugh junior, and, or Carietta, a child is packed in dry blue ice in silk pyjamas they have an emperor’s crest it is dark in there but it’s cold as the green jacuzzi, bubbles are clouds on its face I will crush the glass with the fingers in his back and pile on my rings and all the fur coats and move down the circular stairs, bloated with gold the flowers are a venus-flytrap, with red curls flames and noxious breath his betrayal gives me granite fists, girls scatter movie stars crumple as I run away, from the gaudy prison cell, of tinsel and skin I’ll sue him and write and build a home, in the desert, on the sun a sequined empress, a mirage—in loungewear and harlequin glasses