DOROTHY LUNE

Orphan

i.

My eyes are as wide as an electrical socket: precise soul & delicate brink. I walk around town in a pink bowler hat and a burnt nose, I feel as if I'm at a pane: victim, not a warrior— but someone. I watched Dora, I imagined having her mother. Fathoms à la maison & fathoms à la tête; anchors that whistle lullabies.

ii.

Strangers squeak at a worker in the milk bar, adult children grunt in its janitor's closet. I have a cup on the door / to hear these winds / these foreign regions / one has a dying mother, another has a criminal mother, the last has a quiet one— I often wonder / if she had not fled / which type she would've grown into. Like salmon in a river next to a nuclear plant, what eyes she'd have / what eyes she'd have—