Some Things Are Always Borrowed

This dress, for instance,
black, a vacancy of sound,
pressed rough against the pale
soliloquy of twilight.

Here, she's a vein of dark
running through rock,
an apostrophe, her hem
unraveling, catching,
conspicuous.

Mistress is lovely, though, 
slipping from her tongue,
something to be kept,
small and endangered.
tasting of rain.

She hasn't forgotten the others,
their spells of chamomile 
and saffron, or the daughters
in playgrounds, chanting,
hands linked like strands of rope.

Their voices are blown 
eggs, fragile and high, 
the severed legs of broken dolls.

She learns to disappear 
in plain sight, render
transparency, even as his hand
rests in the small of her back,
his fingers brush the inside of her thigh.

In his bed, she fades against the sheets,
bleaches white as a wishbone. 
If she holds her breath when she comes,
he may not find her, will lose her 
body to the wash of daylight
coating the windows like honey.