Simone Muench

You will bind me
in an aquarelle, my skin
blue as Canterbury bells.   Call me
mademoiselle before you execute, like the hand-
tinted photo of the dancer, Margarete Gertrud Zelle, arms
scissoring the air, fending bullets and flowers as she pirouettes.

You will find me
in the zero hour sipping
a whiskey sour with a cherry, my hair
yellow, not sallow or frizzed like Bishop’s flower.
In a bell-shaped dress trimmed in snow-white florets, I smell
of fever, soil as I pose in the doorcase.   You refer to me as daughter

of gnawed bones.
I am property of ________.
A profile in the slanted rain. I am
versatile.   You call me Lily of the Nile, fingering
umbels as you scour the floor in search of my shadow.   Hours
sift and flow and form a canted frame where you lean on one elbow

statuesque as a window
sash.  You’ve captured me,
you say, mid-bloom, in your eye
frame, in the process of photograph and pose
and polyphonic prose, the kitchen lit by my ante-
bellum skirt, the yellow bells of forsythia going up in flame.

                first published in Diagram