8/21--Cassandra

Cassandra

Cassandra is a chemical
colliding with herself,
the green blue light of reactions
a lunatic’s moonlight laboratory, where she
practices that same alchemy all rejected lovers know.

“I, more than anyone
should believe in phantoms.”
she says between bites of juniper berries
and olive pits clicking against her teeth.
Wine and smoke slosh and curl down her throat.
The imagined one imagines Cassandra’s marble legs
descending her wooden stairs
her ghost close behind.
His tears
hot rivers running down her legs.
Her exorcism: “My mind might be a nice place to visit
but I doubt you’d want to live there.”

“He tells me, ‘Write it down, Cassandra.’
as if I haven’t already,
but it is all fantasy, a story told to an ugly child.”
she explains, her brain a burning mattress
or a lukewarm tub.
Inside her body, guitar strings strangle her organs.
That same ghost, of course.