Dead Girl’s Smile

Not that anyone cares.
In the lightless hall striking scores with hands, toes, thighs, waist,
the gesture becomes language itself; surgeons wear masks, the women wear masks.

Mirrors on the walls
Reflect glasses on eyeballs
As heads, arms, hands, feet,
And legs are moved and erased,
Draped in skin-tight gowns
Which hang from feet,
In corpses’ striving twists,
Untransfigured hands grasp pillows
as they are pushed back to lift dressings,
as they try to fold clothes which flutter to the floor like bared breasts

As heads are pressed into pillows, like soil into seed.

And he is no doctor.
A vampiress is there, and she fixes her eyes on him, her mouth curling
to cast a dead girl’s smile when she speaks to him in Her foreign tongue.

When he leans over her to press the mirror to her forehead
as she is being lifted for transfer to Healing care, It is a mirror
Of life, and he asks his patient

What she sees,
And she responds,

“You see?

You’re dead.”

And now her stories and poems appear in public space, best poets, prairie Schooner.

Too.

:: 10.25.2022 ::