Allison Benis White is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, winner of the 2008 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades, among other journals. Her honors include the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Bernice Slote Award from Prairie Schooner, and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She is currently at work on a second manuscript, “Small Porcelain Head,” which received the 2008 James D. Phelan Award for a work-in-progress from The San Francisco Foundation.

Purchase her book, Self Portrait with Crayon, and check out her website, www.allisonbeniswhite.com.

Dancers with Green Skirts

In order to make the scream disappear, she holds up one hand to block the other dancer’s face, which means she cannot yell fire with her hands on her hips (her elbows triangle like wing bones), which means she has no face. A scream is either doubled or disappears.

Her hands reach out as if through a mirror. And the top half of her dress, and the other dancer's fingertips—the way fire moves quickly up green curtains. What touches us will hurt soon. Flames might roll across cabinets like a miniature ocean, a lullaby, a hiss inside a hush.

Or against the living room wall, the fire might be controlled in a single frame and never stop. Just as, when one mirror is held up to another, the reflection cannot stop and burrows a tunnel of reflections. It will be difficult to breathe.

When the world is finally over, a fireman will move through it like a blind man touching his wife's face at night, in order to be certain. The slope of her nose under his thumbs and cheekbones under his fingertips—his hands will cover her face like a butterfly.

I recognize is the reversal of I disappear. If I could only save one thing, the fireman says as he walks, it would be my mother's wooden clock, with the blue bird inside. Time was or time is when it appears. Just as a house appears in his mind out of nowhere, late at night, lit from the inside, trying to remember itself, room by room, as it burns.

Frieze of Dancers

I could trace a bird in the window frost, out of proportion with the branches and too large to be born at all. Or a woman taller than a snow house waiting for her birds to re-enter. I could say out loud, I am near her whom I have made, who is waiting for God. Which is not brave or enough to make me memorable or shimmer.

I can erase people easily too. This is a forest made of glass. It is so beautiful, I could say, it must be a lie. Which is a way out of awe. Out of my mind. When I drag my hand across the window frost, when I am done, I can see through the world until the emptiness unties even the perimeters and their sadness is gone.

This way or then altogether frenetic. As in placing several strands of hair behind someone’s ear while they sleep. You have to get closer and suffer the shape with your fingers in order to see what you’ve lost in the forest. 

Soon their fingerprints clouded the glass to the point of lace and there was nothing, nothing anyone could say, such as tabula rasa or Alaska, in order to slow the touching. Even the tires touched the road always to make a space through, evenly. It was aspirin to sit and look out the window, to listen to other people, sometimes my uncles, in the front room, talking.

Or a stone in a flock of glass. Or the reversal of a window breaking. The shatter contracts with a gasp and forms a square through which seasons can be viewed. This is a form of chills. Just as a skirt grazes a chair or the movement that continues through the shoulders, backs, and heads until it is interrupted by the chairback.

A woman’s back is bending away. And the gloss of ice that coats the pelvis, the curvature between branches. But it is too late to predict the season or the kind of reversal that would change my life. My mouth, in a dream, anchored with snow—the way numbness makes the jaw feel large. I can no longer say anything simply. 

Dancers in Blue

Everything happens, is gone: four women in a rehearsal room. A moment I can watch lose. They touch blue sleeves off-shoulder, stretch. Memory is movement unhinged. Each woman turns toward a different angle, are all sides of one woman. To remember now is then, or the difficulty of wearing an off-shoulder dress. Their dance is rehearsed before mirrors until grief is perfected. I want my life stilled inside a frame. I look—a woman is multiplied, looks away.