Pink Bedroom (Odalisque)
You Offer Me the Lamp Your Wife Is Throwing Out
after Richard Tuschman
I’ve tried to tempt you out, to lie
naked, my back
to the wall, to say
there are only two
rooms in this love, come back to bed,
but you say that is your bed, this is
your dream wake up
I didn’t mean to say
so much — there is always too much,
my desire as performance,
as disappointment, my cigarette
rising its pale sigh of smoke,
my thighs opening for your mouth. In
the mirror, I rest my cheek against
my palm, curve of my bare hips,
my breasts, sun on my red hair.
In the other room, you
read the morning paper, scratch
your toe against the red carpet.
And how could I not
ask you to come back,
to wander in and say I remember
these pink walls, the blue vase
on the vanity, the yellow curtains,
to run your fingertips along my spine,
to lie to me and say yes yes
it was always you.
Wake up, love.
The daylight is growing dim on the floor.
You Offer Me the Lamp Your Wife Is Throwing Out
Such a pretty thing,
your wife’s lamp—
in the kitchen next to the telephone
bills and your coffee cups.
You and I have been such beautiful
wreckage, such blue fire.
You offer me her old lamp and all day I go on
and off. My face flickers at each place
you have kissed. I tie and untie
our knots until I expose every
nerve like a raw wire. I do not want
her lamp, its cheerful
brass switch. I do not want
to walk into my bedroom and have it
on my nightstand watching me
like a suspicious housewife.
At the other end of this cord
that we keep trying to break,
I have grown to love
the darkness. I am
shutting off all our lights,
smashing every glass bulb.
Amanda Auchter the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the 2012 Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming at The Huffington Post, CNN, Crab Creek Review, The Indianapolis Review, The West Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project. Follow her on Twitter: @ALAuchter.
