Gretchen Primack

Alan Anderson, 3A

Someone’s snapped a pink
tutu around the earth’s middle,
and don’t think she isn’t
ready to close shop, turn
the stools onto the bar and sweep
us the hell out of here. Everyone
at my table is ready and willing.
Someone at the next squeezes
a fiver under the tutu’s elastic.
It’s hot in here, ever hotter,
and the heat is breaking the mantle,
and the floor is seizing, and the partridge
is draining its sawdust, and the bass’s glass
eye is melting, and the sad burgers
congeal in their fat behind the bar.
They are her daughters, you know,
who comprise them, they are kneaded
of the blood of her children, nothing
gentle about it.  Out. And what
ceremony would change her mind?
What could be undone, and what done?