Lotte Reading by Marguerite Strongin
There are no small parts. Only small actors
BORN with a raspberry birthmark
That shone on her left cheek. From the start she was small on a small stage.
Now, 12, she lit the pilot for a winter night. She sang, a shout-out to her voice teacher: Lotte, her lyrical sweep on life, ‘this God-forsaken island’
Choir practice every Wednesday night
Voice dark as an organ chord, her devotional attention increases her vulnerability
Pencil thin. She is a servant of time,’ Char’ my last child, her mother said.
‘We are related,’ Cassandra said lying on her back in summer grass Elated Lotte. whispered back
They locked eyes. She texted her life in script, sepia ink.
Her life was a nesting- doll narrative, a burr in her dream teddy’s fur.
Her outings weren’t to paint the town, the sadness of pantomime, of workers leaving a factory
Coming home, eerily serene was a combustion of longing and sorrow. Winter night, the blue gas light burning.
AUNT, A POET
Charlotte on her birth, crying
--only her siblings called her Lotte
Left scattered footprints on various avenues,
Tree-lined streets
Typical New England. She had another 100 bird divination.
Only her thoughts were off the beaten pat
She wandered wee
Wild quail sheltered, a deer after birthing a swan.
She blew the dusky off an envelope before opening it.
So, her life is recently swept ceil, her tomboy straight as long bone.
AUNT, A POET exotic as an iris
Charlotte saw her from Glasgow, a tall Glaswegian, hair copper as Persian carpet opened the gate. She bumped the gate, crushing the gloxinia. ‘God, where are you now’ thought Charlotte.
--only her siblings called her Lotte. She was the odd one.
Left scattered footprints on various avenues,
Tree-lined streets
Typical New England.
Bur her thoughts were off the beaten trail
She wandered while
Wlil sheltered, a deer after birthing a swan.
She blew the deer off an envelope before opening it.
So, her life recently swept, her tombs stone straight as long bone.
SHE CHANGES GEARS
A Capella
Immediately tailors her rage
She holds in hand a highly inscribed piece of military art.
Turns it over
Long ago, when the baby had melba toast
She wavered like a needle on a compass
she has beauty still
The more I suffer
The more I
offer
Dark eyes, shin pale as eggshell. Skin which hurts. It was mapped out at birth.
Standing up to her family, stone-but-stone has built a wall.
CALICO Healing
when our hurtling headlong is blocked, we need to change not just direction but dimension. Decelerate. Look up.
endif ds
with uplifting gospel,
extending her courage.
Outrage dies. Her brown eyes
Wide with amaze narrow with age
Going away, coming back along the seamed road.
The sisters overshadow each other
In starched light
Her whole life an age of anxiety:
I push you away, Lord,
Yet you come toward me. My angst moored, and sword.
WOLF WHO HOUNDS ME
The war arrives
An explosion that may leave my face scarred face scarred.
It is a small-town yard my backyard:
Who’ll watch weeds create a diagram
Like those that cracked codes, or cancer diagnoses.
Living in North light,
scrapes the paint / off the canvas
takes the patience of a saint.
What story do I stand on? After a month of train-watching
Rails run against brick, rails split and sparkling. Love in a hood, lighting a smoke, darkling.
CHACONNE
It’s great to fall in love again
Not head-spinning like the first time.
Death, I have been in the ring with you often,
I throw in my counters.
Playing with fire at birth was I burned. I dance that sad slow dance, the chaconne.
When a baobab dies,
It may leave a shadow on the ground.
That’s us,
Tearing up our dance card. I meant to tell you mine is bare, no baby ever slept in the cradle second-hand, coverlets lace and linen.
I AM SAD because a Baobab is dying
She wrote in her diary
‘If you sing on one side of the trunk,
Your singing cannot be heard on the other’
It is said.
Here comes
Bossy Boots
You mow he lavender,
Leaving sweetness over the town
A FIRESTORM
Lotte knows the sudden styles love can take
The layer born under the skin.
All vellum and onionskin papers scatter. Romance, its rind.
Her struggle with God scattered by autumn’s North wind.
Hiroshima ashes glow. No more requiems.
The dead are sad enough in their eternal silence.
Below, in the street
Vendors sell peanuts
In paper flutes.
We hold ourselves together
As one blue petal of the rose in glass wilts—the infused one the untouched like I own—one a new love flows.
MAGGIE FLYNN, tell me is it futile to be transparent…
As what
The glass vase that holds the rose
The fire on the burned face glows
An unaccustomed East wind blows. Her heart thru her ribs, a pelycosaur neglected, Maggie knows shows
She misses a husband
For evening conversation
And other things.
She is sad because far away a baobab is dying.