TUMBLE DRY LOW • writing • poetry

I'm actually writing fiction right now, but these circus poems are my work in progress. They tell the story of a woman, Virtous Virginia, who joins the freak show of a small Midwestern circus. The circus has plans to leave Minnesota and go up north to the Arctic, but we (both the circus and the writer) haven't quite gotten there yet.

THE MERMAID EXHIBITION

"Straight from Fejee to you!" the barker ballyhooed
in front of the eight-foot banner that trumpeted
a flaxen-haired bare-breasted sea treasure.
Somehow it worked. The circus-goers paid, and the Tattooed
Wonderman ushered them inside the mildewed tent
where, under the blue work lamp,
in a wading pool stocked with flicks of carp,
a mermaid sat and warbled, to her mike, low-rent nonsense.
The crowd got restless--"No no no!" he railed. "She’s genuine
as me. Hey, in the sunhat, you--go touch her fin."

Someone touched her fin. In the blue light, her comb tore
through her wig again. Red flash of her singing tongue,
the stinging smell of kelp--he blocked the exit,
waved the dollar pamphlets, chided "this ain’t a charity,
you peeping toms. No one exits without a souvenir."

Virginia Looks Through a Keyhole

It was enough, to see a lot of darkness and some light,
to hold the key but leave the pine door locked,
who said one needed to be touched? It was enough, to be the slight
of a hand, the hardly discernable movement
that waved away the circling moths. She recalled the bittermint
in the rafters where young-her once busted a chest open
to find not a reflection but a remnant.
She wore it to the dust, her hands all over, herself, in the holes,
it was enough—as here, it was enough to watch the form
approach, its dropped robe, its feathers and limp foreignness
on the floor, oh I know you—to watch it like a peepshow,
the approach who pushed its lips against the keyhole,
it was enough, Virginia knew: to watch and be watched,
a finger at the pulse point, mouth pressed to a grain of wood.

Virginia Sends This Letter Home

You said go join a circus so I joined
this single ring of sawdust without a safety net—
where I play the woman in the counterpointed
whose fire is heatless
though no one guessed that, such smoke is nested
in my hair. And there are clowns
with broken hoses, yoo-hooing how I’ll be rescued
although it’s me who blows my own flames out—
I’m told the act’s hilarious.
I was also told: “carve, out of yourself, a legend
to exhibit during the intermission”
(i.e. this is the border woman’s
scarf, this is her scat)—so what remains
of me? Which tacky forget-me-not
have I become? Whose daughter?

VIRGINIA DISCUSSES SOMEONE ELSE'S IDEA OF TEMPTATION

The twelve chorus starlings of whom most people have envy—
outside the pens they wait nightly for their equestrians
to stallion in, like a misplaced fairy tale
and sweep them up across the soy bean farms,
twained and doth. Come dawn, they’re returned
to the horse trough—where I can see them, scouring manure
out from their hems before the early show,
cooing about the forest they were eased into,
the acres of pines, the underbrush of petticoats, opening—

Hence, there was I still costumed from the spec
‘til an equestrian once seized me by mistake,
hoisting up his banderole of a collared hind
as we fleethed—where? Where were the woods
they had moaned of? Why was there only a border
marked by stones where he—nay, I—turned back?

The Tattoo Woman Reveals Her Tantalizing Story of Captivity
Where She Was Seized, Captured, Dragged Far, Then Tied Up for Three Years
with Wild Vine till She Was Marked Head to Toe

“He wanted to transform me into Eden
slowly, with pain—hours…no, breakless days of Christ-thorn
tipped with ash, the mallet’s tat tat. ‘May God unweed
you,’ said that pricking savage. My skin: his forge
for holiness. My skin: the Lord’s bellows. Skin: a stinging
exaltation! ‘Pleasure,’ he said, ‘through hurt’
and as God said ‘let Earth bring forth’—I was the Spring,
a resurrected body. ‘You are my Earth,’
he said, he wound the piercing blue Euphrates
around my lips. My eyes he drowned in the Tigris,
my nipples—hid in the crimson pigments of a lily…

Bound, yes—gagged, yes—and christened until my ass
was Sodom’s vine, my hips clusters of gall-grapes. ‘God is
on you,’ he said, panting. He said ‘a sealed fountain.’
Petals filled in, blushed. He said, ‘you, an enclosed garden.’”

SHADOW PLAY

Sure, some things the shadow did up there made it familiar:
its nervous tics, how it kept turning in half-circles
like Virginia did, to look behind, at no one giving chase—
this wasn’t what she wanted for her unconscious.
Even the posters on the door, where shadows eased
from other women’s backs like an untightening heat—
she wanted a burning range
so why did the puppeteer deliver
the line I knew a woman, as made-up as a myth?
Why would Virginia, as if peering down a well,
glimpse the faded outlines of an elsewhere
someone had tried, with stones, to drown?
And if that drowned home was the dream,
why did part of her believe she must have been
there, casting her shadow out, onto the picket fence?