Anna Girgenti- Three Poems

Paper Dolls

Thrown

like a harpoon into time’s hands

each holding a pair of scissors the size 

of a human body

here we stand

there are two things we use:

First is ink-

its promise of immortality

the echoing laughter of children who 

run barefoot in the night

holding lightening bugs hostage in mason jars

not yet aware that the scent of freshly mowed grass 

requires an act of severing, 

all born from

the healthy marriage between 

creator 

and paper

Second is blade-

what the coffee grinds said to the egg shells

in the confines of a landfill 

to dig penmarks out of flesh

to peel away pages of our paperback lives

to extract droplets of liquid gold from fireflies

and bathe forever in it,

to say of what lives 

in memory:

“this does not exist”

Life 

rolls out like a luminous

scroll 

adrift in the black chasm of time’s passage

some of us cannot retract what 

we wrote

instead of erased mistakes,

we carve clean-edged 

holes

to take out the trash is the 

rebirth of a 

mosaic 

maybe

nothing is created

only borrowed 

and we are children 

cutting dolls out of magazines

learning how to trace well 

the permeated edges

of the ones 

we 

love most.

Sensory Threshold

Right now,

you are breathing.

It is working.

You are fine.

One time,

the man in front of me in the checkout line 

at the grocery store

held up a gun and

took all the money from 

the cash register.

The clerk let him do it

stood still 

looked at me

and said, “we are being robbed.”

After he ran out the double-wide 

automatic doors,

she scanned my eggs and my

clementines

she said, “how are you?”

I said, “I’m fine.”

I took off my head 

paid for it

and left it on the conveyer belt,

a gift for the next customer

a wrong and a right, a death and a birth

we keep the world in balance

we cover diamonds with dirt

we throw leftover sandwiches 

through

the broken windows of 

abandoned buildings    

straight-faced, we say we are okay

while a stranger draws blood from our veins

you walk home in the rain and crawl

into bed next to someone you don’t know

but 

you recognize his face

because you married him 30 years ago.

Between the sheets, right now

you are breathing.

It is working.

You are fine.

Achilles Wears White Nikes, 1999

Homer wrote:

“The gods envy us”

  They envy

     us 

 because we 

   are

  mortal.

I envy the black Nikon camera dangling 

from your neck

when you jaywalk in the city

at 4am. 

       And I collect red flags 

on the 8 mile path

to your front door

     open me

     with your tongue

consume.

“Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.”

The next day

in the shower 

I pick up the bar of soap

     and carve your name into it 

     until it bleeds all over me

and stains the walls & the drain

and I am 

choking on capillaries.

   With your Nikon 360

you capture the whole scene.

Photojournalists

flock to L.A. to see me in a sterilized tank

of red liquid.

I grew fins.

These modern kings measure my

red-scaled limbs.

“You will never be lovelier than you are now,” you say.

I envy the

dead beluga next door

and the soap bar 

and the Christmas lights you hung yourself with 

last December.

I’ll keep you between

      the slits in my gills, friend.

  “We will never

            be here

       again.”