Dreamscapes from the Atlas of Coming and Going
VII
Because Ayyappa Paniker wrote, the broken words that fade out, pieces of murmur float down
from the ceiling fan. Almost forgotten–the blinds slatting streetlight no different than moonlight.
Because forgetting each step to a woman’s house begins with reaching for a watch in darkness:
The path, its waist-high switchgrass and feral cats, the leaning porch, a door then another door to
the bedroom, the dresser’s mirror (all-seeing cracked god of fading words), cayenne and cumin
drifting in from the kitchen as if to say remember the mortar-ground scent of her skin. Almost
gone, her profile in sleep’s rise and fall, the irrelevant words fading out until even the poem is
gone, leaving only the tall grass it parted.
Portrait of Girls with Night
These women whom you have led here as accomplices to your evils
we will either sell or, stopping them from making this noise and beating
leather skins, make slaves for our looms.
– Euripides, The Bacchae
Girls cruising a boulevard, the motor splitting adrenalin Do we wait up? Inevitable,
One-part nerves, two-parts high. Her leaves and musk.
Let’s look no further than strobe lights, says night, The officer said
Guys lining the walls until Stairway to Heaven. Raving in fawn skin.
Girls vamped up same shade as night’s middle finger Said the homecoming king
And all the plush animals Mom can’t throw out. Is still recovering.
There’s the kingdom of med spas she’s buying, the attic’s Exhibit A: Sleeves torn from
Foxed yearbook, the girls night stopped calling– His letter jacket.
Now’s the time, night says, for a smoke outside the club, Re: The Girls
Because burning down only to grow up condos Votary or victim?
Is tomorrow. Now’s the time, the girls say, These snakes
To dance on the hood. Almost forever: May never wash out.
Neon humming behind
For lack of contrition,
The gods locked her up
In the suburbs. Do we
Need to know her leaves
And musk have been
Distilled? Sometimes,
The buzz comes on just like
hysterical laughter.
L. A. Weeks’ poetry can be found in journals such as Nashville Review, Harpur Palate, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, and Colorado Review. Her poems also appear in The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. IX: Virginia (Texas Review Press, 2022).