Weaver’s Way
And the ceilings are high, voices echo from two rooms over
among arches and paneling. Dark water. A river, green
and lapping in a distant country in which I’ve never stepped foot —
I feel sand. Smooth like clay, fine grain coating my ankles.
I feel eyes on my back now, two rooms over, detached
from the conversation, so reticent, as if I could never know
what they are thinking. I dab a popular perfume under my ears
so that every time anyone smells florals and powder they are
reminded of me. I grow out my hair so that I can comb it and everyone
can see it, combed. My skin drinks in sun like a dog
in mid-afternoon and I can’t shake the feeling that someone will come back
for me. If they come back for me I swear I won’t run. Think back, grip
the hand of the child taking in lake blue and pea green, a chopped
bell pepper, acidic, sweet, so new. I crouch on the bathroom tile. I want
to paint my fingernails a glowing lapis. Want to cradle the sour bead
in my tongue and swallow. A signed celebrity poster. An old-style
dial phone. Click click, bringggg. You out there. Do not hurt me.
You may know how, but nothing gives you the right.
In Blue
“You forgot it,” I say to your ghost in the glass jar,
to the masonry with a screw
loose. “You forgot all about it.” It’s starting
to hurt again, I say to the jar-glow, to the loose screw, like a pocket
of fermented grapes lodged like air, lodged
in my throat. I feel your singular eye upon me, blue-filmed
and rolling. I’m starting to feel my skeleton within my hands,
its clockwork, the leering Cheshire cat,
the small shooters served with soft sponge, all the pastel sustenance.
Your ghost which has formed the habit of ignoring me
even in my flower-pearl earrings or my shoes that
add an inch. You forgot it — the way limbs
can prop to mimic ballerinas, the way an empty warehouse can turn
regal in the right lighting. And will you miss me, when
the curtains close, when my shoulders emerge backstage,
when it occurs to you I am somebody else.
Must we pity the changed for changing?
We all trade in the real deal for costume jewelry
just because it shines. In our fictionalized Paris,
jazz still lulls on and people die. Remember.
—Dylan R. Ragas ’26’s column, “Yard Sale Organs,” is a collection of poems that attempt to make sense of a past — real, imagined, but mostly somewhere in between.
