Kublai Khan in Transylvania
It’s not that no one will hear it. It’s not that
her lips can’t move, or his eyes won’t close tight.
All the lights stay on,
as if the audition never ends.
Unable to catch his own face in the mirror,
he’s afraid that no one sees him. In the next scene,
he waits, lying in the open field, for dawn to reveal
the burn marks of his disappearance.
Her film is the silent one.
Watch her loop the cloth around her arm.
After her mouth has moved, someone we can’t see
puts on placards the words she didn’t say.
Switch the channel, please.
There is a field in Iraq, in Gaza, an airfield near Kabul.
Here is red meat for the dinner table. You can’t
use a knife like that, with the camera recording.
Tuck in your napkin. You might be the star.
In this scene, you kiss him greedily. In the next,
you drive a stake into her heart.
The blood will flow off-screen.
Two women kissing, and the film bombed. No,
the field was bombed, and my close-up taken.
These gestures of solidarity have become clichéd,
as though the blood said nothing.
How many striking ways to drive the same point home.
How to be dreamy always. How many air strikes.
The scene is set. The extras are shooting up.
All your lines will have to be improvised.
First published in The Main Street Rag 23.2 (Spring 2018): 48.
