Free Match by Helen Guri Page B

theme park of someone else’s misfortune.
Not even the phenomenal muscle
of my Popeyed brain could stop her.
I am sorry about the lump in your lung or your gut
or wherever that bad-luck penny
landed – tails. Truly.
My imaginary girlfriend, her elegiac
scent of magnolias, is sorry too.

DEAR ANGELA,
    But it is your real life I am writing, the one where
you are a past-prime basement renter
wizened by twice-filched ideas
for tattoos, sun-belted patio minder sconced
in neon nylons and a grin like perpetual noon,
or even a man with a well-groomed retriever
and a falsetto for answering the phones.
A dwarf among sleeping women.
Your name Susan or Gertrude or Humphrey,
and the seams that hold you together
visible to the naked eye.
    Degrees of separation
are in the low single digits
and dwindle as summer unfurls its rag mats.
You could be a friend or a lover
of my ex-wife; you could be my first
cousin, and would that be so wrong?
    We’re linked by the crumbs of a hurricane trail,
cheques I’ve penned to you
with a meaningful silence in the memo field
like a line dashed down the centre of a road.
    I stare at that line whitely
as the sun stares at snow.

HIVE
    Work week a tickle on a haunch
with no muscle, terrier strays
of a sleep-tossed sheet. Mumble
mumble. Side-saddle on a lint
wildebeest in underbrush,
celeriac jam of dentist-
numbed mind-traffic. Work morning
trickling out a variation on spring,
plucking the clotted daisies from
between toes. Comes like a
one-size-fits-all, non-optional
bargain-basement pedicure,
synthetic swabs of clothes.
Comes with advice scribbled sidelong
on damp leaflets in the bathroom:
Nibble the rubber bullet, dodge
the glockenspiel mallet.
An albino ravenousness
in the belt-trough trenches.
Tupperware tuna salads
food-poison nuclear marmot families.
Each fantasy of the ideal crouton
went soggy. On the psychopathy
checklist, a middling fibrous number
that is humbling to crunch with Wheaties.
Midweek dentists splint split teeth
with cat hair and glue
distilled from the jigs of grasshoppers.
Any given Wednesday, a breakfast table
chock-a-block with full-grown victims
of wave-pool trauma; their hamsters
are swimming in bowls of homo milk.
Oh gosh. The lengths of white icing, front-crawled.
Those fur-covered, sound-wicking walls
lowering over the week’s tiny ears
like a helmet. Shoebox diorama
ready for takeoff –
    It may surprise you to learn
how high above ground
the employed really travel.
Each day a solar wind sucks us
30,000 feet above supper,
which is served in a sandcastle
ruled by an imaginary queen.
Each night I crash softly – ploff –
to build it new again.

IF
    One person can make something for another person to touch.

    Any number of hypothetical arms explains why my hand is reaching.

    Art means giving an object a mind, letting that object use it against you.

    Curiosity is love, a lot like it.

    Unanswerable questions receive air shipments of emergency provisions.

    I give you a mind, will you hold it against me?

    I nod off on a pillow of cumulus that is a factory where God is a woman.

SMALL ROOM
    Spoon, tea, bowl, cup
pot simmering
bald spot
three prickle-fine hairs on the nude part
    electric light on, off
heaving of the curtain
yapping of the lock
    yammer of the unoiled
mailbox hinge
    in my mouth
always a mild taste
of idle duty, epoxy.
    Sun lending its ribs
through Venetians
to a chest –
    for several golden hours
the day has bones.

DEAR ANGELA,
    A drawn straw’s chance we’re siblings, split
twins – still I want to see you wear that seamless
zip-up godsuit you reserve for formal galas
and stand-up performances.
Where you deliver that rubber woman,
the punchline of my life, sweet-knuckled
for the first or umpteenth time.
    Everything you speak rhymes.
I go out in storms to get struck by lightning,
hoping I’ll glimpse
your index finger, pointing.

DANDELIONS
    They proliferated like the season:
kittens on spin, pinwheels
in the tantrum of morning.
    An antsiness at the edge