NewPoetry

Sara Krahn
after Blossom Dearie

As yet, your lamp-lit hands chord
into cool fourths. You sing,
and there is no turning back.
What is strange begins to ache

with the familiar. Around a corner
your eyes castle the sky and cut out
a prince’s beat-up jawline. Your voice
hovers at the easy edges of his hand-

some psychopath, a divine body
spring-loaded to shoot. As yet, a light
song on your lips as you pass by.
Here his mighty oak never drifts

far into your dreams, unlike the willow,
her sylphlike arms swept aside
for you as you sigh from a closer
distance. You’re told only the oak

must matter to you now, as if oak
was always the matter with you now,
his shadow fire between your legs
as you round another wrong turn. You walk

a little faster, as if you could walk
a little faster. Your gaze flickers backwards
into a glistening pillar of seasalt
air and the sea. Like Lot’s wife, you will be

remembered in the other direction,
even as a new vantage point upswells
in the ocean of your mind, saccharine
jazz, vibrato-less soul dissolving time.

Somebody catcalls your name
as if this was always your name.
You sing as a girl to your lover, as yet
somewhere a killer awakens.