JACUZZI SONNET
I set my crown on the ground.
I trade it in for a miniature beret,
placing it atop my very French braids.
Hooray! I grow magnetic with rage,
watching my dream house sold for asking
on House Hunters. It’s so modern
being alone. Having all this time to read!
The dish-washer does my daughter’s homework
for me. I wonder what it’s like. Revenge
is banana-flavored. Everything
is historic. Here is where I picked up
after the dog. Here is where meaning
gets made. Here is the jacuzzi,
for which you are named.
TEANECK
Home again! And the house is silly with rain.
There is jazz on the piano, water in the kettle,
the hair of my dog Blockbuster stomped into the rug.
Visiting home for the weekend, I am a guest in my own hotel.
Hotel vomitrocious! Hotel clutter city!
Hotel what was I thinking
when I was eleven!
Now I wake before my mothers do. I obscure the mirror with fog.
I remember never inviting anyone over to our house,
covering the nude sculptures with a sheet. My playdates,
always elsewhere. Allie’s beaming basement. Maggie’s wooden yard.
Alone with the sprinkler and making outfits from towels.
Alone in the kitchen, folding magnets of words.
The low fuzz of the TV, in my ear and curdling.
The Westboro Baptist Church. Always on the news.
IN THE SOLARIUM
covered in expensive daylight
the flower petals rearrange themselves anxiously
my gaze is a dimple pocking
the afternoon I make you forgetful
in this wax paper the ivy drooping like dish gloves
the driftwood of your seatback refracts light
against the wall it’s leopard print
I am gloveless and spinning like a dentist like a doctor
the cedar at my center releases small wicks of breath
no butterfly net to catch it just pink muhly grass
like when an escalator slips back into itself
briefly where’d you go the world flattens
now for a slice of sponge cake evening’s spotted leaf
I wear the tulip necklace I dangle my foot from the stool
you show me a zucchini flower which I assume is just a name
but people eat it it is zucchini you are eating it
stuffed with cream I am trying to fathom
the world without perfume I get choked up
I hear a timpani I lie face down in the hollyhock
the room suddenly flushed with sound
what is a fava bean the window is tinted
echinacea looks like a pin cushion crossed with a weed
I make jewels at you with my eyes
in the greenhouse machinery moves me I get ensnared
with dill across the pond’s gelatinous surface a thick
and fugitive green I know it to be poisonous don’t sniff!
that stuff will give you helmet hair bad helmet hair
and that over there
is a miniature trampoline shhhhh
it is sleeping and you are turning your back to me
it is dahlias to be with you
Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio is a poet at UT Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Gulf Coast, Southern Indiana Review, and NECK. In 2018, she received an Academy of American Poets prize (selected by Dorothea Lasky). Luci has two lesbian moms, and is originally from New Jersey.