Night Blooming Cereus
She could step outside and hear the blues slingers from her door,
though distorted, as if coming through a mojo filter
and the fog-eating forest.
She keeps her aspirations on torn paper in a wide mouth jar
and films herself before a bank of mirrors
and lets the world know she will dance into infinity
branching out from each ladder of ribs
even when all hell is breaking loose.
She dances for the beloved dead, her son who’s cast his spirit
into the black stars and her friend who followed soon on
a skateboard.
She dances for her surviving daughter who, back turned,
fixes her hair, standing firm as a sapling,
She ghost dances for the holocaust survivors and the
derailment of tears.
And for the ocean that breaks and pulls back to throw itself
on the shore again, as she lowers to the spring loaded floor
and cobras back up again.
She’s a yogini and a part-time wrathful dakini, storm swirl.
She has been torn down and spread her winged skirts a thousand
times and pressed for the moon even when it burned and turned
to a funereal urn, the plum blooms bearing down in haste
in an early deluge
Now she goes out on to a wire with a sketch net below
arabesquing to find a new love and dwelling
one foot over California and one over New Mexico,
the practice run for the Taos poetry circus.
There the men contenders in the ring oil their muscles.
But she spars like Aimee, Frida Kahlo doing a tango in
spite of her train wrecked past, finishing a gliclee with a glide.
Or O’Keefe collecting the most stunning bones out on a plain
Among the space ship wreckage of Roswell.
You beat the smoke tarnished silver into something wearable.
I can see you coming out into a makeshift theater in the round carved in
red rock wearing a hazmat suit or astronaut gear.
Slowly you remove your helmet and protective coveralls.
Deep body roll.
You’re dynamite in black leotard, a night-blooming cereus,
There in the moonscape, rock strewn and blossoming with a come-
hither flame in the core.
Amy Trussell
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