Inheriting October
Give me Antares, the brightest star in the Scorpius nebula
as Libra season runs dry.
Give me Jack rendered dull by work without play
and Mia Farrow’s tannis root charm.
Give me Quinn’s red mouth synched to Double Feature.
Give me monochrome Karloff, the bolt-necked creature
and the lotus-light girl who floats between shores.
He takes her to the lake to see if she’ll sink
or bob on the surface
spurning the sacrament,
witchtrial.
The quiet, the unmoving, will inherit the waters.
She inherits her weight, and falls without flailing.
Give me that night of supermarket face-paint
crusting, crumbling over closed eyes.
Give me eye-rolling to a string of boys
that it’s not a ‘goth costume’; I’m Siouxsie Sioux.
Give me the regret of wearing a wig in a too-warm room
and the uncertain seconds on the brink of words.
I always think it’s obvious how much I like people;
I forget I’m just a face — painted, not talking.
Give me the moth glued to my bedroom window
nightly warming her curved underbelly.
Legs flat, pressed as though desperate
to shift from one form to the next.
A beating heart, balled-up, she’s impossible to please.
Wishes for a self with no size, no temperature,
no wishes: This time next life,
I’ll be a flickering light.
Give me the time I was envelope-beige;
the pinafore didn’t fit right, I sat
funny all night, but what did it matter?
By 3AM, I’d have thrown it to the back
of my wardrobe — crumpled, forgotten.
The khaki shirt, buttoned-up,
resembled Shelley’s enough
that when she wandered onscreen
in the clothes I’d tried to assemble
I could yell ‘It’s me!’
Over lukewarm cardboard pizza boxes,
my friends looked to me and said, ‘Oh, yeah.’
What they wanted to say was: ‘We know.
You’ve been talking about this for weeks.’
Give me the time I was envelope-beige.
Send me off in the mail and I’d come right back,
baseball bat in my lazy grip. I’d come back
dizzy with clacking typewriters,
my head a hotel —
corridors of old, framed faces.
A maze slowly covered in snow.
Give me the mistress of the dark coming out,
her lover kept a secret for the past twenty years.
‘If I were dating Elvira,’ I say to a friend
‘I couldn’t keep it to myself for twenty minutes.’
Give me the red dress of Lydia Deetz,
the one I’ll wear this year. The Halloween shop,
unable to name the film outright,
label the costume: ‘Beetle Bride’.
Give me walking down the aisle
but not saying ‘I do’;
give me a wedding
between chaos and comfort.
Give me a crystal ball, baby’s breath,
the meandering armadillos at Lugosi’s coffin,
and the coveted tears of Robert Smith.
Give me the voodoo doll I made at seventeen —
the doll that looked like me,
student film project relic.
Give me the near-drowned sailor who knows my fortune,
but won’t say if we will come back up for air.
Give me the Other Father’s song as the piano plays him,
and a crayfish bathed by the mothering moon.