She keeps a crystal ball on the coffee table
at a Super 8 somewhere between Harrodsburg,
Kentucky, and the cornfields she’s afraid to enter.
She’s thirty again. Spends her birthday burning
sage, rearranges history with the lifting
of a little toe, composes wars while singing
in the shower—“Viper’s Drag,” “Honey Dipper.”
She’s the “Lady with the Fan.” Tan as deep
as tamarind. Whatever secrets she’s received,
what talents, doors as wide as steak knives open
on a nebula she knows she’ll one day enter.
Weather will not touch her, nor the sounds
of schoolboys in their march to physics. They
won’t fix this hole. Alive too many lifetimes
to believe in cures, she passes decades with the gait
of Tolstoy heroines. However deep she cuts,
it is the blade that bleeds. Her skin like water
holds no form, but folds, and folds, and follows
numbly through the hours of a day.