Home Recordings, and; I cannot leave my house
- Home Recordings, and; I cannot leave my house
Home Recordings
A woman stands in the wedding dress her mother made, icing theangel food, waiting for the marriage to start. On the television Elvis isa freebird,
Elvis is a housewife, Elvis is wearing a shirt his mother made—andher crystal is full of sherry, the afternoon light is porcelain.
She wonders if one life cluttered with another's is the beginning ofgentleness, but she dreams a highway through the night
like a bullet hole through a bee hive and thinks, yes, yes, love is the fistfulsof angel food brought to the knife fight. Love is the fistful of handsthreatening a sunset.
Love is teaching the hands to cope like lace after violencing thethreads. Love is the mercy of destruction. I miss you, America, like Imiss myself—
like I miss the indifferent gauze of a wedding dress, like I miss a memorythat does not belong to me. And now our Tennessee Queen,
our sweetheart, is untangling from the tinsel with his head thrownback, laughing at the idea of what we all might be. [End Page 54]
I cannot leave my house
I cannot leave my housefor the white peacockshave formed a coalitionon the front lawn and wherein the four corners of daylighthave I not already been, anyhow?
They make a trail of feathersto a copper river some fewtowns away and you—unawareof the copper in your pockets,just shy of poor. [End Page 55]
Jackie Braje is a Brooklyn-based writer, the programs director for the Poetry Society of New York, the editor in chief of Milk Press, and a poetry MFA candidate at Brooklyn College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Westchester Review, Nottingham Review, Bridge Eight, Brooklyn Poets, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Waccamaw Journal, and elsewhere. She is also a contributing editor at the Brooklyn Review.
