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Michelle Mitchell-Foust

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After the Flood

after Rimbaud

Outside of town, the carnival fought sleep, its arms encircling
A tuft of grass. The stalls drew themselves into the dirt streets,
And the boats arrived, as on a canvas, to take it all away.

Ever since, the flea-market sellers panic over their leftover carnival goods:
Bronze centaurs, a bolt of dope silk announcing ‘The Hydrocephalus Baby’,
Mirror rusting black, holding tank, one hundred feet of hose.

The sun pours over the fish people of 1814 Krakatoa island
Whose see-through vertebrae burn red behind the glass, nearly
Puncturing their own news story: their ascension from the sea.

Inside the velvet ropes are more ropes: evidence of the summer
That the SEE THE EFFECTS tent trailed the freak show,
With black sheets and organs, water and sadness:

A naked boy shouted in a cage, and held a boa
Out of the bars - with girls outside it, looking in.
He’d been separated from a star. He was the hallucinogen at work,

Or he was a hoax, who became those girls’ hallucination for sin.
Under this bright and sudden shower, the fortune teller won’t tell us
What she knows, and what we have, until now, ignored.

Page(s) 10

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