Anne and Sylvia by Marie Martin

Your eyes hash so lurid, sisters,
screaming of Nazis and moons.

Neither one of you managed to escape confinement,
both surrendered willingly
to the comforts of strong arms and children.
You suffered for your gifts in due course:

wore tailored clothes and drew up your hair
with innumerable pins you wished
would drain your skulls of noise.
Scabbed at your scalps
with the crust of hairspray.
You even bothered
to smear waxy blades of garnet
against those dull slashes
you wore as holes.
That kind of thing
was necessary
in your time,
you couldn’t even be seen
without hose.

So you paraded around like
bedraggled ponies, dull eyes
surveying the ground
lighting and sparking
when you found something
to devour:
Poppies.
Bits of hay.

Mostly your backs were tired
from giving rides to ungrateful children.
The farmers, too, were demanding and cruel.
They would sell you for glue
to nail shoes on a newer steed.

Publikumsliebling,
I have heard you
issue those
wavering commands.
Heard your voice
read the words
you tag your name on
over a sizzling bit of vinyl
in my college radio station.

Your breathy overly assertive
interpretation of
what you halfway died to see
sounds awkward
coming out of your own mouth.

I used to think Anne
should have been ashamed of herself
with her model’s face
and intellectual drone
and team of attendants.
Her network of relief.

I understand how your suffering
urged messy gossip and trite
mutterings from her pen.
I feel you are mine, in a way
she never was.

She is my mother as much as
the elements,
which are constantly destroying
and reviving one another,
on the cusp of
swallowing breath.

No,
actually, I guess
that was you.

I suspect,
though,
that she knew
you snatched
at the same bits of stardust,
knew that you
adjusted your ham radios
in perfect parallel pitch
to receive transmission
from the selfsame babbling muses.

Oh, she stretched long fishlike strands
up to collect their songs,
only to brush her painted tentacles
against a smudge of their becoming,
frantically biting off her nails
to the quick
to rub against her gums
congealed bits
of the raving incandescent dust
you ate whole,

still alive,
dancing and chirping
and running like lemmings

into your open mouth,
emitting their wail,
summoning beauty
for the vile deed
of your truth.

And you became.
And so much magic
died in you.
Supernatural bile,
plasma flecked
with gold and blue. Your alchemy,
sisters, was pure
and true.