Watch your step—corset hooks,

sequins underfoot.  Top sags,

north side.   Dark?  Not quite:

see the corner where a ridge pole’s

worked through, right there sun

on a clear day would pour in

like grain down a shoot.  That dusty

Navajo horse blanket there

under the rope ladder, see pink

on its turkey red?  Flamingo: 

when she’d enter sideways,

flashing scallops, stepping high

out of her painted crate, eyelashes

fluttering like gingko leaves, drum-roll,

flap, curve, switch—sometimes

her fan tips caught.  She’d tug

gently, fearing they’d snag, leave

gaps.  Once unhooked, the fronds

swung their half-moon careers

across her thighs, while arpeggios

swelled from the pit.  Then flap,

side, front, step, twist, and the lid

clapped tight, a few wisps still

floating in the tobacco-laden air.

Next performance?  Not today.

Revenuers wrote us up, called

her in, shut us down. Crate?

Picked up in the twister of ’32.  

Shreds of gilded pine showed up

far west as Baton Rouge.

Better duck out now, head

home.  That thunderhead

opens overhead it’ll pock this

tamped clay like beaten brass.

Mary Kaiser’s chapbook Falling into Velázquez won the 2006 Slapering Hol award.  Her poems have also appeared in Portland Review, Cincinnati Review, New Orleans Review and other lit mags.  From her home in Birmingham, Alabama, she takes the back roads of the deep South in a 1969 Dodge Dart, watching for signs.