i have a red dress and no eyes. i have a dress that is blood red and i have eyes that don’t blink
when the balcony sucks in. my dress is a beet swollen with thought, and hangs like a body on my body. i have eyes that don’t blink
at being seen. i was halfway finished before i saw i’d begun. my dress drips down the center. my eyes are needle holes
and my dress is an over-red thread. i hang my words in the air by their feet, limp and damp, and my dress is my only laugh
that is actually red. my eyes are the backs of moons and afterwards men jest us like children, and smoke,
and women who have been my dress circle their stomachs with their hands. i’m an actress. this is not my mother
tongue. i have a dress that is yellow. my lines are written by a parisian man. we met in london. i came dancing
out like god upon a crimson wave. my dress hung like a question or a suddenness. he wrote me coming out this way, he says, to make me
like a lioness. the constellations are full of dead women, he says. he says my dress is the coat of a great lion.
i turn like the blood inside a rose. the crowd is a great gasp. i can feel myself become a pear. it’s as if you haven’t taken
pills, he says. i still have that dress. it’s not too blonde or red. you can grasp it with your eyes, he said, the way you wear it.