AMERICANA
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.