Tonight's Poet Corner: The Deflated Mask
The Deflated Mask by Belinda Roddie The sagging folds of sighs and daydreaming in rubber molds and creases and the wrinkles are from the wind blowing through a small slat in your attic window. The chest it lies in feeds spiders ash and dust and they grow fat from the lack of fat with their eggs gnawing at the plaster. You wore this for Halloween one year, becoming thirty years older, wise, still dapper, and capable of properly sporting a brown tweed jacket with a bright blue bowtie. But now you are thirty years older, and that mask at last looks younger, like the days you melted butter in the sky and kissed honeysuckle off of lips eager to see you grow up.