Denise Bergman

her wrist veins blue, a woman lets go the trapeze bar rubs chalk into her palms wipes chalky palms on her silver sequin leotard • elsewhere a woman keeps breathing / breathing she breathes / breathes into a broken child hit by a hit-and-run • elsewhere a subway rider Jay St. to West 4th grips

A minute in its creaseless uniform in a row of cadets, salutes Dusk can’t contain the torn sky’s entrails A half-past-nine like all the others but its own half-past-nine An unpassable valley between tick and tock, the scout reports back The scout measured: distance equals length times time Distance circumnavigates time The prisoner’s minute was

Notation’s just part of the story, I know but it matters if you carved the heart/arrow/name before the first kiss or soon after if you kissed her or she kissed you either way a hasty abbreviation— the leaf-carpet crackled, footsteps coming this way • Later, erasure— crossed out in a flash, love scraped away fast

Her portable garden escapes the terry gym towel.
Unweeded gladiola shoulders.
Arms with petal trails.

“Ageless Skin”
the full-color ad ink is still moist:

Dead Sea complexion cream
erases wrinkles

smoothes out image and misperception,
intercepts inconvenient

Matchstick thin a girl
with a jug too burning hot to hold

stumbles
and the field of berries holds its blue breath
as she and the jug
fall soundless
on the shoulderwide path of matted-down
footsteps.

Boots in the vestibule sop a wad of rags…