Issue 2: Arlene Ang

Polish Dancer Prelude
after Chopin's Op. 28 No. 7

The birds have stilled. He cups his breath the way

his mother read the music sheet, possessed

Chopin. What are these numbers on his chest

if not time signature, a score to play?

To everyone, he's dead. He drags each day

behind him like a shadow, someone's best

friend hanging—purplish—from a hook. He's dressed

in rags that patch his skin towards decay.

The winter rides his hands. A fear, like whiff

of black shoe polish or a cattle car.

The barbed wires keep him in; lice dance his head.

He fingers his mouth haltingly as if

in search of keys, a melody, a scar

whose mother was a wound that ached and bled.

Recording of Chopin's Op. 28 No. 7

The Local Physician Returns to the Ski Lodge

The ski lift that brought him up

isn't the ski lift that sends him down.

And the movement rouses his suspicion---

does the slope glimmer a lost amulet?

Is it the sun or hoarfrost around his eyes?

The descent is neither vertical

nor horizontal, neither short nor prolonged.

The stretcher carries him deeply into the middle

of things, often called sitzmark

because the body rewinds into playing dead.

Sitzmarks, when they occur,

are halfway between eggs in the caravan

and a water-baby squish.

He never thought of dying twice,

or six times at the same speed,

in the same ski jacket, wearing the same

ski goggles down the same trail.

Perhaps it is all about timing,

believing the funeral before searching

the coffin for a corpse. Perhaps

it is all about the snowplow, wind direction,

the washboard. Perhaps it really is

a matryoska of funnies

if not for the painful backcrawl of joints.

He's thinking he's lost the ski poles

going down, he needs to relocate his hip

for the flight scene, he needs

to return to the hospital—as planned—

for his afternoon rounds before he's found

splayed on the snow, before

he's forced to listen to the medics hum Mozart

off-key over the radio because

it's been a rough weekend for everyone.

The 38th Secret Love Poem

After scrubbing the blood

from your panties,

my hands burn from the laundry detergent—

but don't feel any cleaner.

How quickly water blushes inside

a white basin. The heat crawls up my arms,

undressing me. I've put my throat

in your drink again.

You don't need to see

the streaks down the glass. You know.

On your sideboard,

a biblical passage

details how the juices

from Eve's half-eaten apple

partook of Adam's fingers.

Your face appears in the french window—

a study in foetal grey.

I kiss my left wrist for you,

using my tongue to remove the taste

of salt. Outside, birds wrap

their feet around television antennae.

The clouds, dragging their weight

like garbage cans or breasts

over rooftops and trees,

deploy a primitive urge of their own.

Arlene Ang is a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. A poetry collection, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon, co-written with Valerie Fox, was published by Texture Press in 2008. She lives in Spinea, Italy.

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