Lindsey Webb

Selections from Mancala

The window takes its time swinging open and closed.
          I alone in the hallway, red curtains, a piece of the garden running over my hand.
          A rabbit in the middle of the road, falling
asleep.
          Earlier, I made tea by rubbing my mouth with the back of my hand.
          All over the table hot water spreading thin, turning black, not
cooling.
          Tiny structures, my mother’s white dishtowel resigned, fat, floating in a deep gutter.
          People can see me from their trucks but I act like they can’t, I throw rocks toward
the trees.
          Or something else, a flooded church.
          Peter’s near the greenhouse door with a knife.
          Green peach,
flat arcs.

Given my relationship with the president, I walk to the dinner party alone.
          A cracked field or plane—my body in a crowd.
          Peter takes a photograph from above.
          A square of linen, a balcony, a gust of wind—my face covered in small
interruptions.
          I’m alone near the exquisite vase into which I stick my
whole arm.
          Peter laughs, blue with a bit of white.
          Someone crouches near my table with a guitar and taps me on the forehead.
          Being a round chamber, I emit a low
series of vibrations.
          A square overlook, a solid ring that leaps ahead not to return.
          I hear Peter in the next room turning mirrors into wine, certainly his hem a red
mess.
          The president gets up to speak and calls me by name but I
still ring.

For the first time, I dress myself.
          Applause from the president on the lawn chair, Peter taking pictures of me
walking.
          A dog brushes my ankle with its nose, its wet eyelid.
          In the warehouse people walk and I look around, off to the side.
          Like me, they wear their hoods
out.
          Behind my own door I find another rabbit—when I unfold it my hands
crumble.
          Her skeleton when I kill her is a plastic water bottle.
          Someone calls my name from the balcony, a chandelier again.
          A peach rolling out onto the sidewalk.
          I am covered in a wide panel, every time I turn I
crease.

Lindsey Webb’s work can be found in H_NGM_N, inter|rupture, Jellyfish, and TENDE RLOIN. She’s an MFA candidate in poetry at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She co-edits elsewhere mag.