Alice Attends Bonne’s Wedding
Once you lean into the hole,
there’s no going back. First the fall
with its fisted jam and bric-a-brac,
your body that hit the leafy earth
with a murmured oomph. There are no
ladders tall enough to get you out—here, there is
only forward momentum, your lily stilleto
tottering toward an altar white as heat.
Toni cues Elvis on the PA, and we all hush
to see you in your sequined bustier, the practiced
up-doo cobwebbed and spun, until I cannot
recognize the woman who just last night
bubbled over in her bourbon, thinking
about the man who now waits in his dress blues
naked on top another woman, her long hair
spread across your pillow. I have been here too,
glitzed up and white, gardenias clamped in wet
hands, small-stepping toward a man
I could not trust. I took his long finger, roped
it in gold, and for an instant, I thought I’d woken,
Lorina stroking my short child locks while the cows
lowed in the green. But the story can’t end
that way. Instead, you each take up your flame,
and see which fires the wick first.