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| DONALD RAWLEY | ||
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| American Beauty I was a bastard conceived in back of a turquoise Chrysler in 1957, in Evanston, Illinois. The landscape of my conception was stained with grey, acid towns, sharp grass and grimacing highways of snow, momentarily white as a butcher's clean apron. I decide my mother was wearing orchids on her wrist. They shook like soft bells under my father. It must have been a night with no stars. Singed early spring blue and perfumed by frosted trees. I was premature, a breech birth, nine hours in delivery. I weighed five pounds with a huge head the doctor could mold into another shape if done right away. My mother said no. There were American Beauty roses from her mother and grandmother. She dreamed of blood. A sleekness of wet things that cry. A Chicago wind slid into my lungs when I screamed. Subject to instant fevers I was wrapped in tin foil and placed on ice. We left my father for Phoenix when I was a year old. Dressed in a cowboy suit I slept on the plane, not knowing then I would be held in arms of air for the rest of my life; this is how we are loved. In someone else's eyes. We fly asleep, we dream standing and we never let go. |
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| Duende © 1994, Black Tie Press. All rights reserved. | ||
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