Kary Wayson

LADY IN PINK

This is the bed I got into with it, your off-put
body—
where I held the heat of it
to the heat of me, the heat of it hating me
heating me, hope
against hope—

Oh sister, lover, mister, self! Back then we were better
than. It didn’t last for long, but neither did it die.

There you are now, looking in the painting
like a mirror, your nose a place
that keeps changing—I couldn’t begin to guess—
your foot in the foreground
dissolving into mist—

or is it forming from it? Your painted lips.
Abstraction, representation. The glittering could be a cat.

I think from here you can see me pick
at the stitching (now red) of an ambulance
tearing past—
how it rends and mends the rip
through traffic, how it holds an injury
carefully in its tank—

for years we’ve been bending the soft sculpture of our friendship
back. I think it’s time to get into it like the

alphabet. Nothing is better between us.

KARY WAYSON has had her poems featured in the Best American Poetry series and The Pushcart Prize anthology. Her second book of poetry is The Slip (Burnside Review Press). She lives in Seattle, where she works as a freelance editor and as an associate editor for Poetry Northwest.