Ann Cefola
The Intimate Room
- cocktail lounge seen from Long Island Expressway
Timeless we sleep and oracle I dream: 42nd and Vanderbilt.
Skeeball kerplunks—brass coil bracelet I win,
like a Tiffany’s gift, frail as arcade’s red-white frame where
crayon-yellow bulldozer takes aim.
Urban tune consumed by new lay, air, strain.
Crowds once circulating like molecules, immobile, flat on their back.
Shoulder to shoulder, look to the sky. Speechless.
*
There may be trouble ahead, chanteuse warns pianist.
Off LIE, hideaway’s martini glass tilts pink-green.
Waitress leans close enough to inhale someone’s lager, salty gin.
Doctor’s gaze travels from singer’s black sequin skirt to gold
hoop in fiancee’s ear where he breathes Nat King Cole.
He is not yet afraid.
Lab tech unzips Harley jacket, certain vocalist is focused on him.
He will film how to disinfect food—cans off the shelf. Outside, tendrils
neon-haloed, school aide pleads, Can’t we go somewhere else?
She will know; tell no one; text good-bye.
At close, singer and pianist upend jar on baby grand to unfold bills.
Home, she bends to unbuckle her shoe; he picks up hat that missed coat
rack,
genuflection the hidden moon illumines. Humming the classic—
insistence to dance—a recollected hymn.
*
In the augury, beloved arcade only a scrim! On asphalt diaphragms
rise and sink. Wire circle about my wrist, vaporous filament.
In bed, you and I curl like cursive, flash vibrant pink-green.
No one knows what is coming.
The tiny glass tips unseen.
Other work by Ann Cefola