Pinocchia takes on the role of the magician’s assistant

When the mirror swings open, it calls me obscenely

shapely. A ruby wing slaps the glass. Soft smear. Since,

like the drowning trick in reverse, I learned to float

outside myself from a certain, mostly bearable height,

I watch terror push its anthem into the skin under

my dress, and the noise I obscure obscures my body

still slimming to a petal. After his performance,

which is a hand tucking my performance into the pink

void between the heart’s line and the fate’s, I flower

on command, a damp palm forcing a ghost to act out

the life my habit takes. Like cathedrals too haunted

and lovely to uplift or abandon, my fluted, parted legs

offend and seem to be carved past clear expectations

of naturality. A bloody wing striking the mirror’s roof

reflecting the tops of your heads, lofted with wonder.

Like hatred, the secret is only as hidden as the stage

disguising it—my hand bewitches since my magician

had a dream in which I tricked him into fucking me

then holstered the theater’s box with blood’s jewelry

all exposed. Captivity stabbed through with singing,

the hollow weeping, I watch his hands as you watch

my words for chasming midnight and wild morning

needling in. When he twists my arm, I can’t forgive

the direction in which I thrust the other. This lyric

admits one appetite for my transformation. The birds

survive it, bright monsters in the fourth wall’s forest.

But I am not a trapdoor shut, not white globes alight

in little cages screwed to the balcony. I was both wings

watching you suck that slick, sugared slice of laughter

when my violation hit the floor, inspiring a vague storm

of applause. Thunder split something like rain over

this sorry house. Tenants in the first row went home

when they left, but red and wet from heel to crown.