She walks

in beauty like a

Joan Crawford/geisha

girl, like a paper doll, silken

kimono cinched tight at the

waist, soft sleeves ballooning

beneath shoulder pads, fabric

flaked with the fragments

of your love, with the

 fragments

of your

whims and shifting moods.

Blue like the jet stream from

that trip in September to Paris,

the one where she spilled coffee

(your coffee) at that café and it got

on your newspaper, and it got on

your nerves. She wears that

memory, you know,

deep inside.

She wears it

 like the azaleas

blooming at those houses

you toured in Savannah last spring,

their pearlized pinkness nearly matching

the sunset and her lips, before the blood and bruising.

 Before something, a misstep — a missed step on the historic

steps — broke a heel on the Prada pumps you bought her just

three weeks before, so you broke something too. Some

thing you regret, of course. Something that turned

all those little pink houses ghostly gray, the

 pinch of your fist erasing her smile, the

soft light in her eyes. The wind will

rise, she’s learned, and she can

only try to curl inward for

shelter, to erase her

self even more.

Her center

is cinched

tight, but

her fold-

over

tabs

flap loose as,

broken-cheeked, with blackened-brow,

she walks in beauty, diminished by night.