The Curtain

My calling comes in the sliver of a window before she draws the curtain, perfume spritzed in a few last words ready for the drain. She bids me to bide my time and lets the line drop

slack, so I test my funambulist limit as the cable simpers underfoot, untaught parabolic beaming scaffolded by idle capriccio until I’m surprised by a cloudburst and fall

flat on my face. Linoleum tacked to my cheek, its design is inscrutable from a centimeter’s survey, though the balm of its kiss softens the heavy humid heat pinning me down,

a density I’m afraid to dare—trespassing in this atmosphere fragrant with bouquets of phrases that split my lips and tightroped their own path past a pall of opaque polyester separating

us. The oxlip-thin oyster is unadorned, but star-crossed comets leap against their pen, vestigial flares my gaze traces in the shape of her celestial silhouette. I plumb

and plume this pearled plane—pristine sleek remiges beading free meteors, allopreening the complex glow of dust aglimmer outside the furled vanes keeping her down

warm—when my universe rustles at the mercy of stellar winds, waves emanating from the pulse of her unfastened wings as I watch them bloom through castoff galaxy (a paltry price for knowing her gravity), obscuring the depths of a brilliance I trust is nested under this nebulous fog of drops

Poetry Steven O. Young, Jr.

Redford, Michigan, USA

caught in the current of the curtain’s tremble. But the color I call her doesn’t budge when she branches out from the canvas, blossom -less twigs in search of soap to wash away

the coats my eyes applied. Her reach reveals too much: wings wholly molted, the nacre of her hand cleansed of its lucent luster. A layer of lather lulls radiant wavelengths—our frequencies cleaved

by a sheet bleaching the astronomy constructing my sky— before my daredevil tether’s drawn taut, the cirrostrative veiling concocted in the exploits of my mischiefmaking opportunely secure as her summon cuts

short my stargazing, recoiling the string thread through my cosmic wanderlust. She picks up where we left off, freshly shed of my muddled metaphors, draped in a familiar diffidence, so I toe the line connecting us once more and let loose another deluge of inadequate analogies, hopeful she’ll accept some speck of her splendor before showering again.