Olivia’s Journal, with Keynote

Olivia curtailed her sleeping hours to fix what’s wrong

some weeks before her trip. Okay, she admits on the page,

it’s been a one-month slog with VISA through salons.

 

Last night, anonymous friend and she, in lace, race to a corner

where someone shouts out a window, “Congratulations.”

They call back, “We’re married but not to each other.” And she wakes.

 

The exotic siren with its piercing wail

—screaming sounds overlaid with panic—

is in the air whipping the harbor: morning in a southern city.

 

What was that podcast Olivia heard last night?

Aussie Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake, a remake of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, crossed with Wharton’s Frome, within a frame, wasn’t it?

Some novel she can’t name and never read.

 

Cyprus pods like pinecones litter the sidewalks this day after Christmas.

Duos stroll, singletons run in sweat-drenched T-shirts, bright sweaters. Chill breezes through her opened hotel windows.

 

Oh, wasted night followed by close-looking in a mirror.

 

Her bush is thinned, a pale string she pulls to find

a tampon plush with brown, maybe the speech she’s here to deliver

from what she suspects is her brain’s thin waste.

 

Self-loathing on her agenda before breakfast this particular morning.

 

The view through her window—warmer air—is open to traffic,

tracks, a shopping mall, and then south to Mexico,

a vista expansive in this hotel where the bill is paid

for the weekend, where she says she’s glad to be.

 

Yesterday at Sally’s Restaurant for dinner

the waiter’s name was Drew, a transplant from New Jersey.

He likes the move, no happenstance but escape

from his family. He only wants a change.

 

She says, she too—from herself. Her body’s sturdy meander

into age provides a gift she’s yet to open, add to inventory:

a story over dinner with women, like the lowly gooseberry

made desirable by a name change into kiwi.

 

I wonder who the hell Olivia is? She’s lacquered, straightened,

thinned for sure. And what she’s not? Cartoon.

Alive when she turns in her mauve bespoke suit to meet the many,

Olivia is full-faced, high-breasted, tanned.

 

Her skeleton is fleshed, her notes surely now ready to deliver.