Vashti

I piss on pots scented with lillies, drink from pomegranate nectar from golden goblets bejeweled with saphires, and shit in alabaster basins. I dip my fingers in marble fountains, sleep on silk sheets strewn with roses and blankets of crimson wool.

During summer afternoons, pheasants sun themselves by the cedars, as peacocks prey among the palms.

During winter nights, your hands slither like snakes up my thighs. Your lips are drier than desert winds. Your eyes pale besides the jewels of your crown. I count the sapphires, waiting for your body to disentangle from mine.

During summer mornings, her back is arched like white marble across your linen sheets. Your lips graze in the thickets of flax that hang from her shoulders.

At breakfast, you read over dispatches from the province while I sip my coffee. My crown reflects the sun. You complain the light bothers your eyes.

"Where are you going?", you ask, when I flounce my skirts on the way to my garden. The peacocks have ornamented their flightless wings with pride, but I have only the golden bracelets that my father gave me on my wedding day.

"I am having a party", you say to me, that evening, during a dinner of stuffed pheasant and fresh figs. "I shall have one too" I reply, thinking of the blue of the peacock's feathers when you open your mouth in surprise. "You have bird hanging from your teeth", I say, and your lips bang shut like a prison gate.

I have not seen you since that evening. I heard that you have since replaced the blonde with a brunette. I considered going once, to consult you about my choice of wines (you're quite an expert on that!), but my eunuch advised me against it. "A bottle of bad white", he said, "is not worth the risk of his chopping off your head". "It depends how bad the wine is", I replied, but in the end, I felt that blood would make a poor complement to my hair's hazelnut tresses.

The women came, in gowns of crimson silk fringed with golden linen. They were bejeweled in pearls and diamonds, yet none of their necklaces matched the light of your eyes, which still paled beneath the sheen of your crown. The marble fountains were filled with wine; the cedars strewn with lanterns. The harps echoed the birds trills.

"Vashti, you look lovely!", they all said, but I had heard the words of too many lying men to trust drunken eyes. I was just starting to get bored, really, when the summons came from your court. I remembered in the days of our wedding feast, when summons would come to the ladies' court borne on the flutes of singing messengers, and you compared my eyes to opals, my hands to cinnamon - your favorite spice. I used to rub it in my hair before coming to bed. I still keep some by my nightstand, sometimes.

But these summons are all wrong. I would cut off half my father's kingdom for one night between your thighs, one more chance to crown your head with my kisses. But to you I have become another crystal vase to parade before visitors. Did you ever think that crystal vases, like people, can shatter? Did you ever ponder that you might get pricked from the shards? Or did you assume that your eunuchs would sweep me off your floor?

I do not bother to formulate the words for a polite reply. With all the queenly grace I can muster, I hand the messenger my crown. I tell my eunuchs to pack my fifty best dresses and my favorite bottles of myrrh, and I go to sit by the fountain, only to discover it is a pool of wine; bathing women splash around in the basin, their breasts dripping when they stand up to dance in the moonlight. Their voices are shrill; even the harpists have become dissonant with their inebriation.

I go back to my chamber and lie down on my bed. I inhale the jasmine-scented sheets. I try not to cry - I fail.

The king sneaks out to say goodbye. Beneath the waning moon, we hold hands for the last time. He is still slightly intoxicated; his kiss tastes of white wine. He slithers away like a snake; the king of Persia has the power to do anything, except for going unnoticed at his own party - what impotence. I can do better. I can marry a weaver, or a baker, a man who can be killed and no one would notice; the king's servants would not risk soiling their robes by stepping on the mud-filled streets for an investigation. We will toast each other from pewter mugs, and make love beneath thatched roof speckled with starlight.


Do my tears glisten brighter than your eyes that pale beneath the jewels in your golden crown?

Serenade

Songs on our lips touching lips;

your fingers play my thighs like a violin,

the measures of your heart against mine,

the cadences of our caresses punctuated by moonlight,

and my brown warmth against the marble of your skin,

more beautiful than a Greek statue,

colder than the winter winds that stoke our love

like the embers of a fading fire.

Her bra slipped off, revealing her breasts that were waiting for his touch. Her dress, a shift of white cotton, had dropped to her hips, and bunched up around her thighs. She was holding a white lilly, drooping gently in her hand, its petals beginning to slake off like dried skin, which she had plenty of around her lips, the color strawberries.

He despised himself at that moment, for wanting her, for being afraid. She turned her back to him, revealing a marble plynth topped with a mop of green that reminded him of leaves, and for a second she resembled a palm tree. "I am not afraid anymore", she had whispered, and he had been happy.

Now it was he who was afraid, in a night of lengthening shadows and satin sheets, and a woman who winds around his legs like a river, it is he who is moored to his own shore like an abandoned skiff wallowing in the moonlight, water rippling, rippling, away from wood that slips, sliver by sliver, into the water, thousands of shards floating farther and farther from shore.

I am re-reading Dorian Gray, haunted by silk brocades and yellow silence. In the shadows of fading neon lights above the old Mcdonalds, I grow afraid, as if the intensity of myself were too much to bear, and pens become knives that will carve into my skin like tattoos, or hollow me out into those wooden figures that dot mantelpeices like flies. In a vaacum that is neither poetry nor fiction, truth nor prose, I fold into myself like freshly laundered linen, peonies plucked from grass, the bright red of tulips reflecting a sun that burnishes itself onto your golden hair.

I cough and the blood seeps out of my vagina, red on white, the lost caresses trickling out between my thighs, lost laughs sticking to my legs like crimson. I once held the night in my palm like a glass figurine, ready to shatter. Now I cradle the shards between my fingers, seeking to reforge the pieces into a king's sword. Who can tell what the shape will be? Only the night's keen silence is awake to my longing.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Unjustly Jails Amphoras

I am a broken jug, an amphora with no handles,
filled with the vinegar of broken promises and shattered desires
that seep out of my clay, fading glaze of naked greek thighs splashed in rotted wine. •
•
Once I drank the wine of your lips, softer than freshly-pressed olives;
I stored your cinnamon caresses in my crevices.

Now I shed vinegar tears, entombed in a mausoleom of glass,
gawked at by girls who have forgotten Zeus's name. •
I have long forgotten your name, but still taste the sweetness of your honey
pouring into me like Apollo's rays. •

Amorous amphoras sing Aphordite's praises beneath golden linden trees. •

Yet I am deprived even the trees of Central Park - they gave them to the Egyptian
temple,
with its filthy copper coins tossed by those gawking girls,
who have forgotten Horus too, I suppose. • •

I would trade all the linden trees for one more taste of your sweet honey.

"I have finally learned to dog men's shadows" she said, taking a drag on her cigarrette. Her eyes were drawn like curtains, her grey jeans too tight as she stuck up her legs on the dresser. "I have never made you dog my shadows", I said. "That's because you have none. You are just a pure ray of light", she said, her sarcasm searing into me like a knife. I took her palms. "Don't" she said, pulling away, but I could see the cuts from last night. "I'll get you some neosporin", I said. She laughed. "Are you afraid of scarring your painting?" "This isn't Dorian Gray, Dana. This is real life, and blood -oh fuck it!" I could hear her puffing on the cigarette while I searched for neosporin in the bathroom. "Sometimes life immitates art", she said, when I handed her the package.

I was silent as she smeared the thick translucent paste over her skin. I was embarassed by how fascinated I was by the curve of her elbow bending and unbending as she moved the q-tip across her wrist - the ritual sprinkling before the sacrifice. "Have you ever thought of going to a mikvah?" I asked. "Aren't you going to fuck me now?" she asked, her hands reaching for her sweater. "I'm serious; people say its refreshing." Her sweater was already off; her bra was white lace, her nipples peeked out underneath. "Since when have you cared about any of that?" I shrugged. She kissed me. "Let's not turn our relationship into something it's not", she said, leading me to the bed. "Where did you get that line, the Lifetime movie special?" "Fuck you." "Oh, I'll fuck you. I'll fuck you good." One hand reached for the zipper on her jeans; the other went towards her breasts.

Afterwards, as we lay in bed, I stroked the scars on her stomach. "It's even better than tattoos", she said. I laughed. "Much sexier", I said, planting a kiss on a particularly gross-looking one next to her belly-button. "I think I don't love you anymore", she said. There was a moment of silence. "Did you ever?" I asked. "I think so, at one point." Silence. "I think so", she murmured once more. My head was still on her stomach; she began to stroke my hair - stroking the lamb into silence upon the alter with one hand, she had already thrown the knife.

I fell asleep waiting for the fire, knowing the burning would come when I woke up to an empty bed in the morning.