my hair hanging long, romancing my waist. Down by the creek with my baby,
marsh marigolds slick as melted butter. His hair sticking up in small flames
like the choir-boy candles we dragged out of the mausoleum each December,
their wax mouths holding a pure note for decades. I was nebulous as an amoeba
or a nebula, hot water bottle with a flimsy skin, my clothes flowed, my eyes
changed color in the fall, my horse was made of rainwater. The key
to the transformation was eyeliner, eyeliner and a series of deaths. I began
to outline my eyes in kohl designed for the stage. Gold wristbands from
Woolworth’s downtown and long, body-hugging shifts I designed and sewed
in Home Ec class, uneven seams, metallic thread. I cut bangs with pinking shears
and hardened my bob with Dippity-Do, my eyelashes fixed into black points
like the minute hand on my dead father’s watch. I embarked on an affair
with my English teacher, a hairy man with a barrel chest who brought a bottle
of Cuervo in his briefcase to our house when my mother was at the gambling
boat. You think you’re immortal, he said, but you’re not. I’d learned how
to hold my face still, my whole body still, even when I waxed the big slide
at Kelly’s Sportsland, two pieces of waxed paper under a burlap sack during
the lunar eclipse. I wore a lip gloss that made my mouth look like glass and rode
the frisky horse of time, mane braided with stars, down the serpentine humps
of the slide. A stone horse, but I was flying.