Holly Burnside

MAD HATTER

I met you where the clock runs on London time,
in a room that pulsed carnation pink and opal like a tear.
No one watched but the broken dolls, who rolled their cool glass eyes
and questioned the connection made through a half-drunk cup of
cinnamon tea, and led like a pulled line to a fall down the stairs
and to one velveteen slipper left where it landed, to a kiss
drawn from Charlie’s pierced lips and an errant stack of
abandoned Stephen King novels, to renegade divorce papers
and a locker full of armchairs, records and ruptured sheets.
I met you like a chemical dream, like an executed promise,
met you lonely and blown turquoise, like a spring sky,
looking back and back again over your shoulder at a girl
with a crypt in her living room I knew I had to steal you from.
I met you once as if I’d never leave, as if we’d just rocket
through space, as if we’d never pop like a cork
or burn out and down like our last few crumbs
beneath the lip of a Tennessee bluff, blinking shocked when the
gauze peeled back and we met like our worst fears long denied.

Holly Burnside lives in Ohio.