Free Match by Helen Guri

RUBBER BRIDE
        The beloved
    lives in the head.
      – Louise Glück

    What I remember is not inviting you up.
You raccooned a gap in the ceiling’s logic,
foiled the bolts with a calling card,
stole across the ocean of an inhale.
    Locked out, I pitched camp on the dew-thralled lawn
while you pissed behind a bookcase
and juiced a crystal vase
to pulp and crumbs.
The gutters ran with light.
    I watched you keep the midnight house –
silhouette celebrity propped on one elbow
in the lumbar region of a synapse.
    You turned out the resident swallows
and invited new ones in
as the leaves on a tree near the window turned
to paparazzi.
    Your feather duster was a dove you disoriented.
    The morning you upset the shoebox
of shrunken heads from seventh grade,
the season careened its bend –
you, snug in the wool place, beading a necklace,
and I without a coat.
    *
    People at work began to notice
my smell of must and rumpled lilac,
how my eyes were tumblers where trapped goldfish paced.
The chronic tinnitus of your shower opera
was embarrassingly loud in public places.
    But when I called the city to get a permit for your removal,
they told me you’d been designated a World Heritage Site.
    The tourists came with cameras, prams, ham-sandwich luncheons,
first editions of certain folk tales for signing.
Their kids playing chicken in the intermittent drip
of mood light from the windows.
    I took work in maintenance –
sank my pincers into litter,
mowed the acreage with a ride-on
while you let out a feral howl
in perfect pitch with my petroleum drone.
The children flocked and scattered.
    It was not long before I turned into a cat
and you flicked paper mice between the shutter slats
on fly-rods. You knit your golden hair in windsocks,
I ran into a paper bag.
    *
    To grasp it – a hint of the flu, a bell receding
on a length of yarn. Tuck it gingerly behind my teeth,
which would become a string of paper lanterns.
    To haul you out and fit you back
into the limp glove of yourself
on the landing.
    Or climb a lattice and join you in hiding.
    Catalogue the various conditions:
When you wear velvet, I grow muffled as a trumpet case.
When you shiver your fork, I flinch silver.

DOLL CHORUS
    The imagination has no bottom line. So here girls sing,
flag their long legs in procession – a wind-up music-box
Girl Machine with whirling gears of crinoline. Let there be
an infinite number in the ladders and pagodas of thinking.
    And a whiteout of lights
where the tunnel of the wings empties
like the snout of a bloom.
Where an audience waits, swollen as an artifact,
to be released from its ice age of watching.

IF
    The song in her nook is the song on my lips.
    The white ankle socks I’ve bought fit her perfectly.
    White noise means agreement, an entente of politics and weather and the thermostat’s freewheeling.
    It doesn’t matter that the awnings are carnivorous with icicles, that people go blindly through doorways.
    The parade float of her skin parks here. Each molecule’s measured trumpeting.
    I stake my quiet claim between two steamed panes.
    My ex-lovers are kindling and the colour burgundy, and they wish me well and have come to dine.
    We clear a glass table to watch – as if it were on television – our shins debate the meaning of the signs.
    The material – a swathe of chiffon – lies at the root of all philosophy.
    The records can reach their crotches with their mouths.
    One root of philosophy is love .
    Oxygen is thrilled by my antics. I light beeswax, wing the unbuttoned fronts of my shirt.
    I am a groundling before the shadow theatre of my wall: two people stencilled on the verge of a room.
    We could write to the ones responsible – in the factories and thought factories in the sky, if any are there – for sending wood and flesh and metal and cast-off Fruits of the Loom by milkman to my door.

LETTER TO A FACTORY WORKER
    Dear Angela,
This pseudonym you use
to answer the factory phones
brings to mind an angel
making