Back to Issue 6
Mary Elizabeth Parker
attention as the woman’s pale white shoulder nearly touches a man’s black one, save for the plate glass between them, she at an inside table, he outside. She wasn’t born here, breaks the rules in small ways: heat sags her skirt in her lap; sweat stings her eyes—she needs a drink: sloe gin, from the black sloe plum. She doesn’t know—do Dixie girls tuck sloe-flowers in their hair? An hour ago, not here, but home, from the antebellum chimney where only swifts nest, a prehistoric scraaaaaww screeched down the flue-- scream big as a buzzard’s, big as a cormorant’s, bigger-- raw metal scream of a pterodactyl which would tumble down like a leather satchel, right itself and pluck her eyes. She fled for here. She waits, and gathers the man inside her thousand-mile stare. Sweaty-pated, with Coke, he watches bees ram the glass, their eyes zirconium diamonds. Refusing His Sullenly Slapped-Down Friesa customer tugs at his fat beard, though it’s high summer, apprises the counter-boss This whole thing's going to hell. She snatches the counter girl (not Nicko, no) close, warns, Whatever performance that was just now, it will not be repeated. And last night, when all the lights went out-- what was happening then? I'm 36 years old and I don't want to sound like a mommy, but there's no room for any of that mess here—this job isn't beer money for me, and you get high anyplace you please but not this place. At Table 1, French fries sag, fed in tiny bits to the baby too frail to wear that gold earring, too nodding to be asked to lick Coke from the side of a dipped straw, too tiny to bear the pin-wheeling weight that could crush her for having been born—not white, not black, and too small—much tinier than mama's pale hips that strained her out, mama herself unsure of her position on the globe—marcelled red hair crimped, flash as a black girl's hair against her white Irish forehead—her eyes looking no place when not fastened on the baby's happy eyes. Outside, boys way too heavy, roughshod, stumbling into their prime, climb the PlayPlace maze, sag the plastic tunnels with their clown shoes, dare the petty gimcrack thing to fail. Collapse, that's what it's sucking toward—where the thing swings loose and clatters—ashes, ashes, all fall down. Girl Fourteen: Maybe Five Monthsembarazada: the green plains of her, the snow-caps, the small waters, caves, squeezed into a booth with her family. She’s just their girl (vessel of perfect reception). her fears the smoke they’ll call holy incense. They didn’t prepare her for this, maybe expected her genes would know not to plump up through all the girlish stages into this. She is so afraid sososososo… A leaf. A bright green leaf flicking on a twig above her face, through the solarium glass above her-- Leap. She’ll leap onto the leaf like a leaf-hopper, leap out from her now fettered body. How could this happen? Self still hunched waiting, waiting to be born perfect and entire-- without this. Muzak Spills from the Ceilingabove the long line for fries--
Gloooria, Hand Jive, Doo Wah Diddy-- a tiny girl jigs in place, twitching and bumping; glittery gold Monopoly clips (gold house, gold railroad, gold monocle-man) wink in her hair. At her back, slumped almost to collapse but trying not to, her mother digs for real coin. This week, three (count them, three) friends call each other with hard news: cancer: the minute spoilage of cells fitzing like the settling of too many birds on a phone line. At the ER yesterday, hoisted onto a cart, she tried to say she felt her heart, itself, inside, not the mammarian cover-- stood before the desk in the wrong department, of course was told ‘Go to the next door, please’. Turned slowly, too slow to comply, like a ship caught in a lock, and as her face tilted toward all the people waiting properly in chairs, fell supine, breathing, bosom rising like a fascinating bellows before the polite eyes trying to/trying not to look/understand. Her body, its womb and lights, its intricate internal lacework, performs its miracle offhand, her daughter’s birth as slight as any invisible daily woman’s chore. So it’s slight, what this body does-- that’s why death disrespects it, sending a scattering of duck cells to peck her to death from inside. She’ll tell you what hurts: her body a field open to any hand, as if fingertips, glancing, could heal years of loss upon loss collecting like rain until the blue receptacle of ease that was her body empties to a loose embrace of bone and skin. Used to be her lovely, tiger’s body, long muscle squeeze; now, impossibly, parts slip their timing, each womb-push rips, tiger arrowing the back acre-- not really mayhem, just hunger, pelt gleaming with the fat of her consumed. Past Midnightthis room sags with the breath of the homeless and near- homeless. Low prayers from the girl in the mint-green slip to the cracked plastic doll she clutches; to the boy with a waxed-paper comb in the corner who screeches the keening of whales-- until he’s booted out. Chitin paring of moon above the plate-glass re-lights the eyes of Gregory Peck, slumped, unhitched, Marooned when his space umbilical snapped. Disturbance of chaos causes chaos: the pattern: Drosophila melanogaster, wrinkle-winged, buzzes dry and Darwin’s daughter Annie dies. |
Mary Elizabeth Parker's poetry collections include The Sex Girl, Urthona Press, and four chapbooks: Miss Havisham in Winter, FutureCycle Press, Cave-Girl, Finishing Line Press, Breathing in a Foreign Country, Paradise Press, and That Stumbling Ritual, Coraddi Publications, University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her poems have appeared in journals including Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Madison Review, and Arts & Letters. She is creator and chair of the Dana Awards in the Novel, Short Fiction, and Poetry, now in its 20th year.
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