Laton Carter
THREE PROSE POEMS
•
Across her mouth appeared the words What are you doing? The typeface shown rather legibly, and few readers had difficulty appreciating the sentiment.
The cheese cooperative had to fire somebody, and during a recess in the board meeting, its members filing out into the empty parking lot, her path crossed theirs—What are you doing?
The football stadium was named after potato salad—What are you doing?
One hundred people died in one country and its leader promptly ensured that one hundred people would die in another country. Her mouth stared at the news.
In bed at night, during lovemaking, the man she was with looked at her mouth, interpreted all he could take, and reached for his clothes.
What was happening to her, and she looked in the bathroom mirror—to answer such a question, to answer it the way she wanted to answer it, would take more time than she currently had.
Time moved clouds over the valley and seasonal affective disorder began to wreak its havoc. The overly sensitive broke first and their movements became more leaden until, within their own sense of time, they didn’t move at all.
Her mouth looked up at the sky. Her mouth looked across the muddy stretch of city-owned land where dogs were permitted to behave on their own terms.
It was not long before the Museum of Modern Art’s curator, contacting her from four time zones away, offered an inordinate sum to install her person as the opening piece in the museum’s upcoming show, titled Commentary, Communication, and Correspondence. The show, as with all shows, integrated an educational component, and when the second grade field trip was led through the double doors and into the foyer, there she stood, and the second graders looked at her and then at each other, and inside each skull and then bouncing out into the echoing hall rose a chorus of definitive answers.
•
When her skin turned blue, she moved to the moors of Scotland. The choice, it seemed, made implicit sense, but explicit logic—or at least logic articulable to friends—was missing. They begged her to come back to New York. Those who didn’t beg gave her three months at most.
Being blue had nothing to do with the connotative sense of the blues, or, for that matter, with colloidal silver. Her skin now matched a cloudless June sky, and the shrubby expanse of grasses and heather brought her into closer harmony not simply with her surroundings, but with the very pores of her newly revised epidermal state. It was true that, in such a verdant setting, and with the washed turquoise chroma of her body, she presented a saturated visage not unlike a student photographer’s initial venture into polarizer filters and long exposure. This effect, she decided, was not unpleasing, and to heighten the results she died her hair raven black and took to wearing blood-red lipstick. For several weeks she was content to walk alone, following the meander of a river or stone wall, her neck and arms, when bared, casting a dullish aniline blue shadow.
But a person cannot survive on fashion. She would have to make a go of it, and acquired a Perth ram as a first step in the wool and Italian mattress trade. Heliotrope, as the ram was named, commenced his own obligations and, after being introduced to a delegate ewe, sired a modest number of lambkins. This made her a shepherd. It’s a sair fecht for half a loaf, she sighed one morning, and laughed at her want of an accent.
•
No one had told her it was The Day When Nobody Goes Outside. Then how did she know now? She didn’t, and out she walked, down the driveway to the recycling container, askew by the curb. That was odd. It was still full of recyclable material. She lowered the lid to no sound. There it was again. No wheels pressing down the asphalt. No siren somewhere in the busier blocks. A hush blanketed her shoulders. And then, as when a volume knob slowly turns clockwise from zero: the indistinct piccolo chatter of bushtits, their acorn bodies darting through the camellia. And now the trees, languidly brushing their hair with the breeze. Her heart began to fill with an altogether new sensation. Instead of horror at the absence of people, there grew another possibility.