Montreux Rotholtz

ARM

• You’re right I am a cruel woman
• Successfully the shadow steepled
• it collapsed the jointed morning
•  
• like pith like the wet pity you get
• when you split open a cactus
• Where a girl twisted down
• in a doorway she was cutting
• off a mole with a safety razor
• and periodically she said please
•  
• I am so sorry Sandi Lee
• for the past for boneless fish
• for oxygen for clay tiles
•  
• Let’s not speak in others’ voices
• The fronds provide
•                               fanged hope
• a pain stimulus the rocky arc
• like an ibis spiked with upward
• like an ibis struggling
•  
• I went back to our house I had
• left some belongings there
•                               my mother’s silver
•  
• my mother compact in her silver
• blueness on the valley’s uptick
• Girls will be perpetual she said
• dumping out the cut glass
• fruit dish so the spines could eat
• and the mud came rolling
•  
• You didn’t know but I stole
• everything I looked at back then
• the water pump the commonwealth
•  
•                                 spitting coal
• Let’s not walk with others’ feet
• the moisture burns let’s not look
• back I see you in your shirtsleeves
• digging a pit and praying while
• shame follows you like your skin
•  
•                                  The axis said no
• and out by the trees like a worm
• my arm clung on like an arm
•  
• Like a worm my arm flicked
• like a god
•  
• Your hair flickering you were
•                              holding your belly
• the ibis in it pitched
• The rocky crop the fond plate
• Now we are not strangers
•                                I planted in you
• that burnt wire that blue jolt
•  
• You’re right I am a cruel woman
• spun with jewels and coal sluice
• like my mother through whom
• order spoke through her throat
• wrapped with asphodel
• her hair a shadowed window
• Let’s not use the hands of others
• Lemon-lit I am and lemon-spent
• and you only thought
•  
• of yourself a protein a millipede
•                                 the cold chemical
• told the future like a stomach
• Let’s not look back for fear
• It comes anyway gravitational
•  
• Like a worm my arm my dirt arm
• dug for the center of the dirt
• I ate everything I saw back then
•  
• bitten lip eternal taste
• of the sweet yam
• I am so sorry Sandi Lee
• for summer’s mark for death
•                                for the sharpening
• gold and for the open brain
•  
• In the doorway a woman
• twisted down and periodically
• her face was there
•  
• The stomach of my mother
• is order is a cut glass dish
• is a prism sturdier because
• of the pieces taken out
• Let’s not use the eyes of others
•                                 wet and staring

MONTREUX ROTHOLTZ has had her work appear in jubilat, The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, the PEN Poetry Series, Fence, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.