“Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin
snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”
Hitchcock
The director can’t help but see in my gesture,
in my look, two girls divided on a playground
by an orbiting third. That little disappointment,
he says, is the empathy an audience feels for me.
They know what it is to see some cloud as flying
monkey, a pair of shoes as threat. They too light
candles in the church built to house personality
and pray for heart, guts, the brains to possess
this body. Dance when I say. Fly then fly over
myself dead in the snow. Or so. In my white
skin the prism of decay, rainbow, sparrow,
hot air balloon unnecessary. If I’m murdered
in this frame, lost forever in the Emerald City
of my own legacy, remember that I harbored
something dirty, felling me finally like a tree
till I shadowed in full sun. Click your heels
three times, he says, and pretend you’re home.
But keep your face still. It’s a crime scene.
© 2007 Lesley Jenike
is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have appeared recently in Court Green, POOL, Verse, and 32 Poems, and will appear soon in Brooklyn Review, Florida Review, and The Fairy Tale Review. Her first full-length book of poems, Ghost of Fashion, is forthcoming from WordPress.
