ISSUE: Spring 2003
Edward Bartók-Baratta
Again: he swears he’ll never. Smiles
as if he will. Outside, the tulip tree
fills out its form in triplicate: pink, discreet. Deliberate
trickery,
he pins your palm on your favorite
of his shirts, and beneath, his heart,
tiny needle’s eye, conducts its study of an endless thread
of blood: Cross my heart and hope. . .
he says. And winks. Outside, spring wizens
on the stem, slumps its crippled wilts toward summer. And
swears
he’d swear even on the cracked back
of his mama’s fat Bible, spine split
by gold-leaf, swears he hopes he’d want to die. Never (your hand
at the dropped stitch of his pulse),
not again. From where you stand,
never’s not far off: in summer, a closed house grows toward it,
a wilderness; in the bedroom, he strips. You,
like bougainvillea, confuse rack and screw,
who is thorn and who is bloom, whose rent pink hangs
scentless
in the sheets. . . After, in the rusty tub,
he draws a bath amber with sap; he cleans
you sleepless with the usual question: in the kitchen, in the
sink, a ruin
of crows rings, black telephones.
