Marionette

for Amadou Diallo The few strings snap and pull the doll’s flimsy limbs for his last ballet, an American piece, arms flung like a flamingo’s wings, his sashay a flame’s undulation, dip, wave, head snapped into a skygaze, a pained grin white beneath the doorway’s light, legs braiding in the climactic pirouette, convulsive shoulders rolling, the body’s final drift smooth as a sun-baked bloodflake flecked off a rhino’s horn, the gored corpse sweet meat to a smoky gauze of ravenous flies humming and blood- sucking tiny gunpowder-singed hearts, charred kiss marks, until, at last, the strings go slack, the doll sprawls in a crippled collapse, his face half lit, the puppeteers praising this black ghost’s steel-pierced, last dying quake, the dead sweet and clean, and that last wheeze, an escaping, you’ve heard it, drops the floodgates for the real ghosts, a bouqet of them, a blitzkrieg of black orchids roaring. And they blaze.