Title Sequence

Day 14, poem 14

I am struggling with the titles this year. But here’s my life as a movie.

Title Sequence
Open on this notebook: spiral, short 
and stocky, a platitude in gold 
alternating fonts on the cover.
Inside, polka dots and off-white pages.
A pen, pink, over the paper and it scrawls,
goes back, crosses itself out. Can you even
understand the way the letters lean?
Do the words they form seem hieroglyphic?
It's mostly print with a hint of cursive
to make the pen glide smooth. She holds it wrong:
there's a callus on her ring finger
from decades of scratching.

                                                    Or maybe
open on two girls downtown on a DC summer night,
hair frizzing, fingers linked. Inscrutable. They drift apart
and then together, move as one but keep
the humid air between their hips. On the metro
they hang from the vertical pole, the taller
around the small. In the suburbs, in the backseat
of a parked car, the tall girl rakes her teeth
over the other's bottom lip.

                                                  Or open on an apartment, panning from the window in.
Note the dust, the rows of posed dolls leaning against barely seen books. The floor
cluttered with soggy chew toys made to resemble human food. There's a beagle
in a cup-shaped bed, one ear tossed over the side, soft and greying at the edges.
See the dishes in waiting, the unopened mail, the writing and sewing and making
in every stage of undone. Wait for action. There might be action today. Sometimes
not if it's one of those days.