A Dollhouse and Love, To a Desert

By Caitlin C. Baker

A Dollhouse

 

 

The bourgeois is draped

in gild brocade

and spread eagle

on a chaise longue

with dimples like

warm pools of honey,

blushing like apples

ripe on the branch.

 

A kitten purrs with brand new lungs

the first time it smells fresh cream.

 

The screen glow at 1 am

is a French street lamp,

a scene in 65 millimeter.

The trench coat is film noir.

She holds me casually

between scarlet crests

and smokes me

down to crumbs,

 

and the ash that falls at her feet

is more alive than I ever was.

 

The end of the world

won’t be as radiant

as cheap stage lights

on coral lipstick

Everything we had

was someone else’s;

it wasn’t in character

to love you.

 

I never knew how to speak to flowers

although the name of the rose was mine.

 

My treasure whispered

fairytales by night:

Cinderella never found

her other earring,

and by magic,

I am a soft peach,

a glass of water poured

out on hot cement.

 

If I ever caught the wild and naked moon,

I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

 

 

 

 

 

Love, to a Desert

 

 

Although the desert cannot return the favor

of the labor that this loving takes,

 

I pry myself open to the thorns and embrace him,

the stoic saguaro, the patriarch of emptiness.

 

A hundred red roses bloom under his care,

and I ask him if he’s ever sore with regret,

 

but he turns the conversation to the weather

and speaks of the scarcity of rain.

 

I bequeath my tears (a gift to the chapped earth

which dissipates on impenetrable ground

 

and is taken with the wind,

the arid and gasping desert breath

 

swallows my grief in a cloud of dust,

scattered beyond recognition),

 

even knowing that my own sorrow

is not the first river to die here.