I knew a girl once, a woman really,
who did erotic dances in a cage.
remember those way back in the 60′s?
by day she cooked soup just down the hall
in a three-room flat with cheap calendar photos,
flowers stapled to dirty green walls, paint peeling,
shabby and sort of sad, like her.
“Here, have a spoonful, no, take a bowl,
tupperware tumbling from the top of the fridge.
meanwhile her four-year-old, Rose, played on the floor
down in Fresno, in grandma’s kitchen,
scribbling happily on envelopes that came
every Monday with twenty-dollar bills for
the weekly trips to Safeway.
Cage Dancer fed me bowls of thirty-something wisdom
riding together in the open-cage elevator on sleezy Turk Street.
we tapped out soft female drum rhythms as we walked,
she with thin, high heels, me, with sandals straining
to match her percussion, but failing, on the way to the post office.
I carried letters to mail home to Brooklyn, lies running
off the pages like slaughterhouse blood.
I only remember her child’s name now.
dancer’s words were frescoed with brashness,
her face, caked with makeup, hair garrish,
gleaming, even on foggy San Francisco days.
she was kind enough, but shot me down when
I asked for help landing a cage dancing job,
saying I lacked the requisite equipment.
One night, a friend and I watched her work,
saw her blazing hair under hot lights, red velvet costume
tautly stretched across body straining for release.
at nineteen we still believed ourselves forever free.
others were stuck in cages, gyrating to someone else’s tunes,
seated in corners with self-made duncecaps on their heads,
trapped by their own limitations.
Cage dancer expressed milky blessings that I refused,
that wept down my chin, my eyes too young
and stubborn to yet know any real reasons for weeping.
I ate soup with kale, stock of thick bones,
simmered to sleep, then awakened with full flavor.
I carried letters to mail home to Brooklyn, lies running
off the pages like slaughterhouse blood.
