She masks her love in sardonic laughter, diagrams
her breaking point with chalk, maps of boundaries.
She says, “We don’t mix well, I’m oil, you’re vinegar
or water; I’m no chef, I just blow smoke.”
It’s too scary for love to be written in cursive on her spine and her heart
is too fragile a package. She says,
“I’m use to packaging other’s pain, it’s normal to hate
me.” Tries to mask the scent of fear in a strong stature, the unmarked change
in her spine. She stiffens
at the thought of weakness, chalk outlines of her tiny deaths
exhaling the smoke of burning funeral pyres
where tears are as good as oil.
Oil paint mosaics of lust have smeared with live creating
an unwanted package, a miserable masterpiece. Alone
she smokes long unlit cigarettes, leaning against life, wearing
a ceramic mask of cool confidence; feelings,
momentary butterflies, chalked up to indigestion—bad food—
she imagined tingles on her spine.
Sometimes, spines have been known to compress due to pressure, grinding axes
and bones make sharp edges, not body oils, unable to move without stabbing;
chalk-up inability to change to re-learning
history. She is packaged jade: smooth and hard. For years, she’s juggled
her handful of makeshift masks or she hid
underneath a thick screen, walls of smoke.
Through the smoke clouds, she watches a wounded back disappear, sees
her red handprints, a burden of proof, seared in her lover’s spine
time can’t mask the force of a shove, unwillingness
to oil a rusty heart, locked and lost
packaged to survive life, a war?
She never crossed the dividing chalk line, just sat
in her self-made cell marking off victims in chalk, comforting herself
with smoke, matching black lungs. She makes
perfect packages of heartaches, numbs
the tingles in her spine. Remembering to keep
her steel doors well-oiled and ever-revolving, someone has to perfect
wearing masks.
When love tries to ease the mask away, erase the chalk lines, she disappears
in the smoke of her oil-fire tears, off
to package her heart along with the awkward tingle in her spine.
