in parentheses

Ruth Towne is an emerging poet. Other poems from her project Resurrection of the Mannequins have been published by the Decadent Review, New Feathers Anthology, Coffin Bell Journal, and the Stonecoast Review’s Staff Spotlight. Her poem “So the Sadness Could Not Hurt” received. The Orchards Poetry Journal’s second-place Grantchester Award.

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@ndrɘ M@ss°n’s Mannequin

What is real?
And who’s to say?

Once, you came back
down Cerise Street,
under lamplight glow,
in the gloaming hour
and autumn’s bronze,

you were a frame of silk stretched,
you were blank mesh under tension.

White gold, the copper red
you said you loved,
then goldenrod again–

when one lamp blinks out,
you will find her,
who you are
whoever you are

a spot of charcoal, a blot of ink–
then, you will have your answers. 

Experimental Research

Nocturnal, unfavorable to either love or metamorphosis, the object sits in the palm. Pythagorean, it calls numbers god. It catalogs each day of its life. And it dies if photographed, digitally or on film.

It lives in the open mouth of a nude woman. If she is sleeping, it appears at her throat, where it clutches her neck like a faux-gold choker. And if she were dead? It would rest in the hollow of her pelvis, about twelve inches away from where she’ll lay carefully posed, an exsanguinated figurine, an exquisite corpse.

Once it is dead-dead on a dissecting table, if one plays math rock music, it changes like some cacti, the princess of night blooming in moonlight once each decade, when it displays its obscure and brutal beauty.

Exquisite Corpse #04

lobotomize me
reality has a stranglehold
on a life I slept through
where the classic American tragedy
wears Prussian blue on V-J Day
& kisses a sailor in uniform

where any object maker can
draw a line from J@ck the R!ppɘr
through to the Cubists

making one mark for the artist
who painted Camden Town
one for the Mona Lisa’s thief

& one for the death that talked
liked priests with doves

the rest is an intellectual game
a suicide note on plastic magnets  

K⊔rt Sɘl!gm@nn’s Mannequin

How beautifully you bruised when your collarbone split,
before calcium carbonate bound to bone. The tissue grew
back scar-hard and carbon-dark. A solitary polyp bloomed,
then one polyp became two. Soon, a secret reef pulsed
between your bones. And you showed me where it hurt.

Once, I was a doll in emerald waters. Don’t you remember?
Now, I adorn myself in drowned women’s jewels and lost
fishing nets. A shoulder blade breaks away, another reef
grows on a statue cast under the sea. You must remember–
you and I are ends of one bone that never healed whole.

The Lovers

Oh, Darling, this is all wrong, I cannot look you in your obsidian eye.

Only bed sheets keep us apart, you and I are lost in soft cotton,
moonstone glow, and pearl white–for all to see, a secret on display.

Now this is as close as you and I can ever get to love,
I never press my skin to yours, or you, yours to mine,
but this is more than you and I will never have, not less.

So, Darling, why do you pull the blank cloth against my face so tight?

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