Geraniums At My Feet
Geraniums at my feet,
I dance a river song til
dusk comes slow wandering in.
The band in the conch shell
croons; this life is impersonal.
Impassioned, unabashed,
I’m sharing me with strangers:
complete abandon.
Geraniums crushed between
my toes, red and creamy white,
I’m ambling through downtown
in search of Eden, Gatsby’s
final bash, dressed for my death.
I find a strange new comfort
in the moonlight of a strange
man’s teeth, which glint like stars.
We float down the avenue;
I fall drunk into his arms.
Geraniums resemble stars
tonight as I lose my shoes
to focus on the ground:
swirling, gurgling, toasting
to the temporary tomb
I’ll collapse into tonight.
The midnight cab, a red-eye
flight or rich bachelor’s yard?
Geraniums on my grave
in the early morning sun,
shining in the lobby where
I hail my final ride home.
The elevator dings and
childhood church bells ring;
my body a ghost, rising
to my floor on angel’s wings.
The bed sheets are creamy white,
the threadbare carpet crimson.
The liquor is all gone; all
my memories have faded.
I dream of that lush green lawn;
I mouth at my strewn duvet.
I should have stayed! I should have
decayed inside the starlight!
Where the starbursts exploded,
where the famous were sublime
and all were known to angels.
Where geraniums could bloom,
and all the world would fit inside.
On the Promontory
I feel your touch in Rockland,
in the fleeting sheets of goosebumps
that on and off coat my inner calf,
inspired by that deliberate finger pad press.
You occult, you vagabond, you
who is never mine
and is with me simultaneously viscerally existentially
all the time.
Haunting all my lower dresser drawers,
remnants unearthed in skating socks
of our decrepit youth palace:
Starland, Rockland, land of ephemeral infinity
of a single breath in time.
Between the Russian cursive
odes to Jesus, Moloch, unamending to your father
found in the Sapphic slips of my bras
and the scars that persist to decorate these walls
like sarcophagi warehouses, modernized tombs,
painted over in deceptive blue
subsequently lost through the generations
eventually forgotten
except for when I, my daughter, my son
feel your touch in Rockland
on the promontory of new machinery America
land of a thousand lights
from terrestrial comets, cigarette fires and celestial shattered eyes.
Anna Louise Steig is a young Jewish writer from the Appalachian hills of western Maryland. She is currently a student at Shepherd University, pursuing an English degree with a focus in creative writing. Her other works can be found or are forthcoming in Uppagus Magazine, Bruiser Magazine, and elsewhere. IG: @a.l.steig