Amy Laessle-Morgan

Carmine

Carmine then—

from kermes, from crushed bodies
not red exactly but that more tutored-red-velvet-wound-tone
the lipstick bullet lifting from its black chamber
hard sheen

as if the mouth required
not adornment but emphasis.

I put it on
under the bathroom bulb’s whitish tribunal
and watched the woman in the mirror come forward
as if called.

For there are reds and reds.
The tart cherry.
The gamine poppy.
The bitten-rind, vaudevillian lacquer.
And then this one:
more evening than flower
more after than invitation
all trade-route and crush.

And because every mouth, once marked
begins its own remembering
I thought—not cleanly, never that—
of a chair pulled up hastily over a trapdoor
of beauty of that difficult order
which asks not to be pitied
and yet goes about the world
half-ruined by its own exactitudes
wanting fiercely, withholding finer
carrying that exhausted shine in the eyes
as if nearness were already injury.

Pressure first
then charge
then that live inch between mouths
suddenly soverei
too fraught to squander
where breath did all the spending
and touch, denied its little kingdom
went roaming mad through the blood.

Such is the old trick of color
to give the unsaid
its little flourish of ceremony

the mouth still carrying it—
small luxurious injury
as if some things survive by stain,
by mark
as if the crushed things were still singing through.