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Two Poems
by Julia Story


Bride/Beer Can

1. Bride
No one thinks about her. Trays slide by attached to hands,
attached to arms, attached to wings. Food: tiny sausages
with toothpick legs and pimiento tongues, marshmallows
dyed vein blue. She awakens startled, sweating. The room
is dark. She sees her veil glowing from a chair, gets up
and puts it on. A large hand reaches down from somewhere,
I don’t know where, who knows where? It picks her up, turns
her over. Pours her. Out comes a dress made of wilted violets.

2. Beer Can
We’re in the room with the beer can, which has been moving
ever so slightly for the last nine days. Using time-lapse film,
we were able to see it do a kind of two-step. But now, now
something important is about to happen. It’s getting ready to split—
see it quiver? Patience, patience. It’s cracking, becoming a mouth
with teeth. Opening wider. Suppress your screams, folks.
Shaking, shaking—it’s finished. Now there’s two cans, exactly alike.
All of that waiting, and all we get are two cans? Now a tuxedoed
waiter has arrived to take them away to a banquet, a very special
banquet, one you wouldn’t understand.

Glossary

Sound:  growing handles
Story:  long ago
Hotel:  fading
Camper:  away from this
Someone in a tie:  the sun going down
Robot:  cloud hush
Threshold:  water
Leaves float by:  again
Sound:  a road
Sound:  “stop, stop”
Sky:  opens
Regret:  a hand opens
Voice:  distant meat
Flame:  an hour
Road:  chugs on
Town:  Arthur
Town:  nothing
Horizon:  road chugs on
A man:  his hogs
His hogs:  low gray sky
Town:  several seconds
Billboards:  food is lonely
Tiny:  myself
Silence:  few trees
Day:  another
Underground:  same day
Trees:  shift, we can’t see
Gold:  glints without me
Night:  dust we forgot
Sizzle:  a language
Language:  dream a house had
Morning:  the sky unglues itself
Leaving:  part the clouds
Walk past:  fade
Squirrel:  robot
Sky:  again
Hand:  suddenly, like
Wing:  collapse in snow