Tonight's Poet Corner: Transfixed

Transfixed
by Belinda Roddie

She enters the restaurant at half past madness,
when it's getting dark, but the summer air
is still strawberry pie sticky, and there's not
enough liquor in the world to quench
your unending desert thirst.

I watch from my corner table - sitting alone,
as usual, having already turned my jacket
purple from too much wine. A friend accompanies
her, guiding her by the crook of her freckled arm,
directing her to a stool while advising her

not to pay attention to the calories listed
beside each entree on the menu. "Don't worry
about it," the friend says. "It's good food here.
Just pretend that this night doesn't count."

I remember her from high school days.
The days she visited a locker only two down
from mine. Back then, she wore baggy hoodies
and paint-spotted jeans for art class, her cheeks

and jaw raw and ragged and decorated
with dozens of pink, round bandages.
She tried desperately to shave away all evidence
of her stubborn facial hair. I wondered how many
cuts were hidden beneath her shirts, on her chest
and stomach. She hated the baritone of her voice.

The two order the whole ensemble: Sweet
and sour, bitter and salty, buttery and crisp.
She crunches a dagger of ice between her teeth.
The lipstick lanced across her mouth already begins

to flake off around her martini glass. Next to her,
an intimidatingly large, black purse dances
across her unsettled knee.

We kissed once, behind the art studio,
where the mural was painted thirty years
ago. She liked how smooth my face was,
how my hips fit perfectly against her hands. Her palms
were rough on my cheeks, large. I called her
my prince back then. She had never wanted
to attend her own coronation.

"Some day," she told me, "I will be beautiful,
just like you."
That was seven years ago.

Now dessert comes, and the cherry glaze
matches the color of her dress. She licks
whipped cream off her finger as if expecting
the drunks at the bar to flock to her like babbling

sheep, drooling from their woolly mouths. I wonder
if she discriminates, if she has fallen in love
with the body she once abhorred, and it now nestles
close to her, hairy and cumbersome, in the
insensitive July morning.

The more I look at her, the more I see
that she has my long curls, my nose, my smile.
These are things I changed or left behind
a long time ago. She will not recognize me

even beneath the amateur goatee. She will not
be familiar with the swirl of short hair pivoting
like a clumsy ballerina across my scalp.
If she touches my arm, she will touch

the new muscle of a stranger. And if she
offers me a drink, she will be surprised
when I apologize for calling her my prince
and tell her that she is now more beautiful
than I ever was. After all,

she wears my tiara now, and I,
Pinot-plastered and Barberra-bamboozled,
slacks tattered and necktie splattered,
have assumed her old throne for my own.