Dreaming in the New House
someone under my hair
who isn't me feels a
bone spur slivering out
past flesh the way words
not said roil and knock
and the next thing you
know they're a bulge,
a tumor. This woman's
wearing my clothes,
packs a wicker basket
of rage. Grenades
disguised as olives.
This woman is lurching
toward bullet-proof glass.
Someone who felt what
was part of her, a child
growing under her public
hair. Or maybe it was the
horse she dug her heels
into like some mare
in Hiroshima, blinded,
hairless, stumbling thru
ruins, her hooves stained
with lips and an eye's
jelly. the mouth like a
fossil leaf in stone
that only later some
museum could trace a
scorched outline of
it seemed she
saw light or
water go thru
a tissue of guava
and jade thru
tourmaline,
caramel, emerald
and cobalt.
Seeing that last
color stings. She
doesn't notice
the wild geese
lighting down and is
flung back hearing
the news that
with cells on a screen, the most
beautiful are
the most deadly.
Then the yellow
blooms on something
that smells like
cat pee or juniper
pull her from
lavendar shadow
the way light sucks
mist to rhinestones
as the weeping cherry
drips diamonds
and for a breath, she
is sucked toward
green, resists fingers
smoothing and
tangling as if to braid
her to that dark, slick
glistening as the
underside of rock she
felt she was sliding
under were headstones
to see if any cells,
any dark shadows
have, uninvited,
tried to slither in.
I wear my lightest
clothes like some-
one about to be
ravished, not want-
ing any zippers or
buttons in the way,
shaves legs the doctor
probably doesn't
notice. Later, I may
be starved but now
its as if the hidden
scar is blazing
in neon, z probe
between my legs
for no one's pleasure,
goes on like a
voice behind a
screen while I fast
forward to unlocking
my car in blazing
August heat, back in
underpants again
like a woman
who's been assaulted
but hears news that
the man tests neative
two heads, one
laughs, aren't
always better
than one especially
when we disagree
about what to wear
but at least we like
the same foods
usually tho when
she gets into garlic
and I'm going to
have a date, it's
something else.
Sometimes we
double and hope
the boys won't have
their separate ideas
of what's hot. If
one doesn't want
to do the whole
pepperoni, we have
to kind of look
away. But when we
are cooking with
boyfriends who never
were opposed to
a little company
under a ceiling mirror
with arms and legs
going all over like
some mad centipede
no one could ever
be lonely
the rooms moved
into me. A wheel chair.
An iv, a box of pills:
nothing was in its
ordinary place. I
thought my mother
would want the photo-
graphs of me at four
weeks, her own mother
with dark hair laughing.
But she turned away
from whatever it was,
wanted beet juice, my
fingers on her skin.
Only the rustling of
leaves already tipped
with blood colors
pulled my eyes out-
side the room. Inga's
blue and rose petals
in a jar, the curtains
inflating and collapsing
the way lungs already
have, a darkened
world. The room
moved into me with
its hospital bed and
lotions. My mother saw
the wooden ceiling
as the lid of a box. A
chest seh could imagine
the diagnosis was
wrong in, the mirror
spit back, a thinner
mother and daughter
as the edges darkened
In a rooming house in the
Midwest Tokyo Rose feels
she walked thru, fell thru
the looking glass. Some
where in a box, the photo-
graphs she is still smiling
in the day she registered to
vote but never did. Instead
she packed a valise to go
to visit her mother's sister
because her mother was too
ill to make the trip. I was so
spoiled, a spoiled American
girl with all A's in school.
I couldn't wait to vote. Now
I see the step on the ship my
first walking into the mirror.
Of course things didn't get
topsy turvy right away but
there were clues when my
passport wasn't ready and
they gave me a temporary
one. Alice could come back.
Oh how I tried to. I felt so
strange in Japan. I couldn't
speak Japanese. I was born
in San Francisco. I couldn't
get used to chop sticks and
the food made me gag. I didn't
want to be rude but I crossed
off the days until I'd sail bakc.
Something still was delayed
with my papers but they said
they'd be at the ship. Dec. 2,
1941. The day is like a scar
from walking thru any ordinary
mirror, jagged, a knife. After
Pearl Harbor, I couldn't reach
my family. Everyone put in
a camp in Arizona. But I didn't
know they didn't know if I
was living. I never learned much
Japanese but I got a job playing
music--American music with
words I could sing to. I
felt at least I could talk to other
Americans. When the war was
finally over, I couldn't believe
they came to arrest me, said I was
giving aid to the enemy. I'm Iva
Toquiri. I never knew who this
Tokyo Rose was. There were no
tapes, a lot of Japanese girls
sound like me. Maybe they said
something. After ten years in jail
I came to the Midwest. The other
side of the mirror isn't a place you
can breathe. As a young girl I
believed in justice. Many years
after I was no longer a spoiled
American girl President Ford
pardoned me. Those who testified
against me had been paid by the
government. My father lost all
his savings trying to help me. My
mother died while I was in jail.
Now in the mirror I see her
sad eyes staring back
--Lyn Lifshin