“What would a person be searching for
outside in this kind of weather except death?”
—Jon Kalman Stefansson (untitled poem)

In the penultimate hour
she looks for Cate Blanchett
in a mirrored hallway.
She tells no one.
It would ruin
the effect. It would ruin

the shape of the loop—
the many loops

she has held down
with her left boot. No loop
can be so constrained.
A sash could wreck her life.
An oversized red silk one
could, in fact, kill her

instantly. But a loop
will not strangle or be strangled.

Illegible laughter
brims to the surface
of her hot pink throat.
A slow-motion pigeon
distracts her from a thief
who would steal

her dreams. She dreams
of Martha Graham.

It means nothing.
A bleeding purple cabbage
reminds her of that first
adolescent kiss
in a closet
behind a milk crate

filled with leather and silk
belts and cuffs.

To be a skald in a taxi that races past
an Uber vehicle
on a deserted highway.
To be reminded of that feeling—
how death digs into her chest
like a burrowing insect.

To be so alive
when her father has been gone for years.

To take a single drumstick
from a hinged case
to make a sapling
without a sound.

To be a malediction
that won’t stick

and a tiny black speck
on the far screen
is to be the one
who stands up
before the train stops
at the next (to last) station.