Toni Scales
ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW
It’s not so much the ache, the empty interior. I’ve been in on it from the beginning, owls flapping their pages of wings, the suicides in the light bulbs. A butterfly trapped in the rain of my tears. How you kissed me on those steps that led to nowhere. I was all smog and lights in your hands, praying saints moaning from between my teeth. Both shamed and shameful, garters always showing and eating you like ice cream at midnight. It’s hard to project my voice anymore, what with all the springs and gadgets buttressing my throat. There's still a whirring in me, a wind chime and a wall. You knew why water kept running from the portraits. Held up the sky but it was all fake, all fake. The sad face of my sex while the roofs swelled like lips. In the desert a doll on a mahogany vanity. One hung like a lantern from every tree.