Lisa Trudeau
Dare Behind the Drapery
The house is fuggy, air fraught with ache and early bed. Nothing moves much. Her mother’s yawn – the suck of famished seas. The radio – a bleed from outer space, its black unseens more real than city streets where ice cream melts and other children play, contagion thumping every pool and swing. Safe behind the woolen drapes, Dare flinches from the crack of sun that blades between and waits for something else – the moon, a mouth that whispers every nasty thought, provokes her dolls in their tiny house to frictions under plastic sheets, stiff limbs pitched. Dare feels weird inside, and sick. She flicks the curtain like a wing and beaked against the glass sees the moon bloat above the backyard muck, lamp its weedy edge –cattail, sedge and meadowsweet, where larvae spoon with viruses as good as death, pupate, hatch, scatter and infect – the moon loves it all, every awful thing, strokes the world with lust, more terrible than God, and closer.
About the writer:
Lisa Trudeau is a poet and former publishing professional. She lives in Massachusetts.
Image: Summer Heat. Running Dog. 1909 by Matiros Saryan (1880-1972). Cardboard and tempera. 22 x 26.7 inches. 1909. Public domain.
