:: Sarah Porter

926 Sunset Lane

The Kitchen, Back Parlor

Conjunctions burnt and dun layer the room—a kitchen, so that the mother may walk backwards. The diagram red-etched and blazing, lines knocked and broken make her passage plain.

The view from the light bulb shows her falling, not walking. The fall is eaten with spoons. Far below dilates an alpine lake, silver-through-seen, scarred linoleum.

Bring in some flowers, no streaks of perspective to help you. The figures are only inside.

Courts drawn on our space where no one plays, bent spurts of rooms, and still a wall you can watch through—forsythia.

(Forsythia again, and the hole for the milkman´s tongue.)



The Basement Library

Pandora (white dress) sows black rice across the floor. How many folds are in one man? she asks (child under table.) Paper dolls pleat air in crowds; which one is Pandora? (Know her by her hands, spindling book-sized flies.)

Pandora with her inky mouth kissed words from the father. Stacking of limbs in dusty contexts keeps away the cold (follow stairs in arms.) We are only hollowed here; the room is a deep one.

(But with high windows pulsing, still, someone could get through. Sun threads a carnal line around us all.)

White are the refugees.

The father pulls them close.



The Upstairs Hallway

Above his shoulders (tethered in glass behaviors) those trees with lions´ mouths. Since no adults remain to sound out upper air, the lions blow a tinny vacancy that drives the ceiling higher; how lions loft blur into vacuum crowning.

Clouding his hands, the brother tries to cry it down. (Child, below, takes photographs with skin; not of the brother. The lake was never real to her.) Sky sounds of hallway call from end to end.

The loud is a case of unhearing. The brother (carpet, blue) shouts, waves a towel. (Eyeline blue-beats, goes nowhere on the floor.)

Slippage from this place is not a game. Their voices keep arriving early.

Child curls around the sore (in the mother´s belly.)





© Sarah Porter 2006

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