Frances Brent
　

Fire In the Doll’s House

The paper house ignites
with an alchemist's bellows.
Golden-finned, arched, dying, re-aroused,
encircling every human and thimble-sized object ―
Love, with the tiniest, red torch branded to your heart ―
will you come now?
Blood blooms lie decked on the mounted beams,
devouring the scabs of tissue roses.
They follow the crumb paths
through little halls and rooms
no larger than the width of a child's hand:
tablets for worms, baskets for a litter of mice,
gnats swim in the pool
of a toy teacup ―
Inside the sleeping tents,
vapor unwinds the dolls from the dolls' beds.
Acid ash snow cloudlittle white sails.

-poem previously published in Poetry Daily
　

Aunt Asleep and Dreaming
(after Ensor)

Aunt is sleeping, sitting up, but the chair is missing;
her arms are folded above the flawed material of a dress:
pear colored skin, waffled throat, shell-shaped ears--
magnificent dreams steam over the yellowed paper and chafe
against its permutations.
Snorts of the curling, wrinkled pug rest at her feet,
vomit of her iridescent breath--in imprecision, the jumbled
monsters, arrange in a ring: googol-eyed, mustachioed, frogfaced,
tongueless beauty in the freedom of rough, essential harm:
the shepherd clawed, the hand transformed but lingering--
Aunt sleeps on, neglecting our selves; her rustic
devils furnish us with sorrow.


Vagabond

He stumbles as he gets off the train, clothes corroded
with acid from the cakes of dirt he will alchemize.
He has the jagged profile of the draftsman's toothless shepherd.
And, when he speaks, it is as though gravel rolls along his tongue--
always with a plume of smoke floating above his aura--

The fusion of metal in this old coin is nothing
to that alloy of pulverized charcoal and aniseed.
　

Lice

Swarming the angel's hair which is substanceless
and from his body to the seams of his mesh clothes,
the lice crawl to the bladder of his genitals
and up past his womanly mouth.
He has that dazed look, half-opportunist, half-lamb,
of all the other angels.
And while the lice travel back and forth, but so lightly,
along his wax hand, they drink from the ghost.
This is the recirculation of love
and the lice taste it, carry it along.

-all three poems previously published at Conjunctions