Frondescence
Mondegreen
Lick the frosting from each remora. Plant a tree in the room where my darkness took root. Blow bubbles and let the boscage chase them. Let there be no part of me left in your life. No mattress on the floor, no come here, go away desiderata. Thank you for the hummingbird airport security mistook for contraband sausage. Thank you for the hoof and money disease. I set you free. Paint the walls and ceilings blue. Look up when you have an orgasm. It will be better this way.
Inside rising midnight the sunny windshield smelled ruddy. The snowdrift virgin with the suitcase fixing the hart – the slow, closed suitcase which the firefighters often buried inadvertently while digging. It was revealed in the mondegreen that she yanked out dandelions, had been galumphing up the handicapped ramp. There she had turned towards a mosquito net, whereas, for a lifetime, a desk scraped her big toe toenail off and she was consoled by a bicycle messenger in briefs – they kissed the air between their lips as he flew. To remove a dead starling from a slot machine takes expertise. She had grown old running her hands over the surface of a new pulsating emptiness.
Erica Anzalone’s first book Samsara was the winner of the 2011 Noemi Press Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from The Literary Review, Juked, Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Pleiades, Sentence, The Offending Adam, Pangyrus, baldhip, Summer Stock, Mary, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches creative writing and literature at Southern New Hampshire University.
