by Allie Marini

i.
Orpheus, on widowed wings,
careens wildly through blank air.
He is kiting toward retrograde orbits.
They are all named Eurydice.
There he finds amorphous blights in his solar plexus.
Once this was love, now the place is named lost.
they evolve, these masks, jumbling:

Icarus, (also winged)
        a desire to fly which bred only a fall—
Faust
        who can love only science
Persephone
whose hunger pangs sealed her fate
Delved into hell, all of them.
Xeroxed zodiacs cannot foresee what’s really in the stars.
Copies are always flawed because they’re copied.
Violent quaking, which gets hollower
spasm by spasm: a cast of the doomed,
lost yes’s spiking underneath

ii.
My face, a collection of oblique curvatures,
masks, behind which to hide, with knitted tornadoes
in places where there should be only eyes.
Rectilinear forms thrown like awkward potteries.
I call this my expression.
Jaundice is not natural; nor the fleet duplicities
turning the corners of my lips upward.
To achieve this is to lasso a zephyr.
I am quietly vigilant in these endeavors.

A maze of identities to choose from,
all gaseous. They float, weightless,
Yawns can all be defined by the chasms
they hide. Even in the canyons flowers twist
to see the sun. They grow in picture jasper.
In common speech, heliotropes of both varieties are called
        bloodstones.
I wear them in my choker and that artless ceramic I call my face

iii.
…which hearkens to Cassandra’s window.
mesmerized by the centrifugal motion of ketamine typhoons,
I try on all the masks of mythology, history, mystery, and lore.
You cannot know yourself unless you fully experiment with the
        possibilities.
I’ve not only seen you become a widower, love,
I’ve also seen you torn to bits by whores. I’ve seen
your head singing downstream. I’ve seen the vampire quintet finish
        you off,
and your golden throat ripped out. That’s my hell.
(It’s like zymurgy, the way it bubbles and ferments upon itself.)
I know, without eyes, what the stars foretell.
I know it without the stars.
Underneath masks with tornado eyes,
and thyphooning synergies: myth and truth,
all these figures are simply gradations of me.

I know this like x-rays know there are bones beneath

ALLIE MARINI first started kicking ass in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. She is a 2001 alumna of New College of Florida, which means she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Her work has appeared in Goulash! (1996), Pan’ Ku (1999), New CollAge (2001), Scratch (2008), Penumbra (2009), Crash (2010), Shaking Like A Mountain (2010), Multi-Culti Mixerations (2010), A Daughter’s Story Anthology, (2010) and Eyrie, (2010). She has lived all over Florida and Washington State. She calls Tallahassee home and is a hairdresser when she isn’t writing. She will start her MFA degree in 2010 and is waiting to see where life will take her.