Cozy in bed, her back curls
like an acrobat’s beneath the comforter
in a nocturne of warm jasmine
and bedclothes’ cologne whose cost might pay
a Medicaid mother’s (or tsunami victim’s) toll.
She is Darwin’s pride, twenty-five,
and on the chair her tiny sequined dress
retains the movements it has committed to memory,
a walk-on part in heirloom clothes, another
trophy for something that resembles acting.
It is a town full of glass-hearted starlets
who stay up late singing to the dark
about the lingering kiss, the rock drummer’s caress,
casual drugs and trapeze-artist sex
until fallen and ankle wrapped in tensor
she takes to bed – two slices
of herbal sleep and endless martinis
for the pain – until the circus landscape
transforms the room into something more curious:
the way fame takes its revenge upon our doom.
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