TWO DREAMS OF THE

AFTERLIFE

KELLY BANCROFT

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
Two Dreams of the Afterlife
by Kelly Bancroft
Copyright © 2020

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the
publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover Art: Split by Kelly Bancroft

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-364-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941390

BlazeVOX [books]
131 Euclid Ave
Kenmore, NY 14217
Editor@blazevox.org

publisher of weird little books

BlazeVOX [ books ]
blazevox.org

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10
Time-piece

The childless woman

I've just met
says she could set her watch
by my biological tick.

A girl's goldfish flickers

in a bag. A husband scolds
his wife eyeing a clock--
You got time to kill?
Inmates in neon poke
the earth with sticks
along the highway.
In the bundles they leave
behind I picture babies,
denture-pink, black cords
brittle as November's stems.
Some days are like this.

Other days I am my aunt Edna,

the blood of her stitched and
re-stitched heart inching
through pig's valves until
her death. At the kitchen table
once she said to listen--
Hear the tiny, flowering ex-
halation, the close and click?

There's no Big Ben

in me, no Grandfather,
no rigged dynamite stick.
But I sometimes hear it--
a cheap time-piece in a kid's game.
Rickety cardboard spinner
or an egg timer: A minute
to find the answer,

15
a minute to unscramble
some sense, a minute to move
your marker, a minute to jump
a fence.

16
Omelet

Another Sunday with this trinity of you — your oldest

downstairs watching TV, you and your youngest here whisking
eggs for an omelet. And again the litany: Is this really a
chicken? he asks. You give him the short answer: Yes. He
laughs, wonders where the eyes might have been, if it died in
the fridge, what it might have felt. Another short answer: You
need a brain to feel.

You're trying to slim him down, only one omelet a weekend.

His legs and arms grow so full you can barely lift him to your
shoulders. The sun beats our tattered backyard shed where a
trapped cardinal once shredded its wings. In the awning a
vacated nest where last May a new bird hung tangled upside
down until its eyes caved in. Why did the chicken cross the
road? he asks.

I want to say something of what it takes to get to the other side

of this. Of grief and flight. The damned over easy sun. The
blare from the basement, anvils black as skillets drop from
clouds. A cartoon man keeps passing the same background: still
life, mantel, vase of flowers, still life, mantel, vase of flowers.
Then a hen house, the chapped hands of the farmer's wife
reaching into the dark heat. And her basket, her kitchen. I hear
the hiss of butter, the shells crack, dawn sizzling. The whirling
laughter of the children.

17
Ghost Story

For your sons’ first campfire

you burn the makeshift cross
of the boy forever lost
in these woods.

He is wind—
Where is my cross?
He is foot-pads
snapping twigs—
Where is my cross?

As long as souls like us

blight the spot his desolate
searchers came across. The remains:
the baseball cap, the pen-knife
etched with leaping trout.

So goes the tale you wing,

the blaze cavorting
in your eyes, and no ember, no
sweater, no arms, no flask
can warm me, can bury the face
of that made up boy
with my wide mouth, your wild hair,
missing, sentenced to walk
only through stories.

Later, out of earshot,

your calmed sons bunk
in the borrowed tent.
The sky over your shoulder
a bag full of holes. The pang
of our pine needle bed
as you empty your ghost
into the moaning ghost of me.

18
When I was a Girl, I was Warned

like the rings of a tree

the lines of a woman’s
neck betray her first.
A woman was exact
change and shopping
carts, painting a mouth

at the table, a wig

in the attic, asking
out loud if you were
loved. And the neon
earplugs in a jewel
box by the bed
to silence the sirens
of the self, the voices

like those of my
expensive lotions now
whispering reversals:
recover, renew, restore.

Inside the skin that keeps

the girl, a star unfolds
from my chest each
morning. The flesh there
wearing thin as filo,
eyelids gathering
like the waist
of the peasant skirt
I twirled as a girl.

19
The Virgin

As if she were
a centipede
(the crooked
blinds, the sun striping)

her body
or one of those wooden
toys of squares
ribbon-fastened rippling

Jacob’s Ladder
let it not hurt
she thought let there be
curtains let there be many

kisses fireworks embarrassed

for her shabby covering
her freckles the stripes
her imperfect design

he fell upon her like

shade before she knew
it
it

was over
she had not changed
still in segments
We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder

the shade stood buttoned

his shirt I will not miss
this if it never happens
again she thought

20
the sun tossed its
golden spit curls
let this be love
for lack of a better word

21
Bridal Bingo

I was thirteen playing

Bridal Bingo at my cousin’s

shower covering with navy

beans the vocabulary of

weddings on flimsy cards

the first to spell out

bride won (my cousin

sullen pregnant) I unwrapped

my prize gold pin of

a dove flat as a flounder

one rhinestone eye I took it

as a sign like Noah’s bird

meant land the prism promised

an end to the rain God said

Let the pairs mate and marry

but you my sweet speller

my blessed prize winner

shall remain free

22
Full House

Past the wardrobe, cold as a coffin,

past the quilt I once stained in my sleep,

through the narrow doorway,

past the pin-up's snapped sunflower head,

past the couch's sunken arm caved

from cradling my older cousin's greasy

scalp for years, I enter the attic cavity

where he bridges a deck of cards,

signals for me to sit, listen up:

Straights, flushes, three-of-a-kind,

nothing so simple as fish to catch, an old maid

to discard, no strategy, just dumb luck.

He lays down two dead-eyed queens

holding flowers, a dead-eyed,

mustachioed Jack. It must be worth

something that among my faceless

numbers I hold the king in his spotted

stole, hearts floating all around.

I ask him: Does a button

count as stripping? A sock, a shoe,

a zipper tooth? How long can I keep my cousin

from seeing my skin, which is his

skin, after all, skin of our mothers downstairs

giggling while our fathers sand chairs in

23
the basement. Work your majesty,
I say to my king, Earn your crown.

But my king turns his face,

turns the knife in his head.

24
Deep Kiss

1. Dream

The priest carpets

every corner of his blind
mother's house. Every doorway
he marks with pebbles.
He arranges her dinner on the plate
like the face of a clock.

On his knees, he woos me.

He presses his smooth cheek to mine,
whispering High Latin. When I say I have
to go, he kisses me, slips into
my mouth a gold coin
he has kept for years inside
his chest. Frosty, clanking,
its bright chain follows.

25
 2. Thrift store cross

It is not my breast the priest

reaches for but my thrift
store cross. He says he likes it,
turns it over, knuckles grazing
my clavicle.

I would like to confess my

lingering crush on Christ. And how
when I heard the priest threw his back out
so asked one of his flock
to shower him, I recalled that
once I believed every object
held the soul of its maker.
Saucer. Blouse. Hammer.

Soap.
I wouldn't want more
than just to hold it against
his back, his legs,
at the place in his throat
where the shock of white
chafes him. Even as a girl
dreaming backstage passes
to my idols' hearts,
I never wanted the flesh,
never dreamed beyond the deep kiss.

26
Swing
(for Elsa)

Because her skirt is a sail

or a drying sheet on a branch
or a tablecloth as it's shaken clean
or a parachute children circle
tossing each other into the air,
it lifts her and each time she returns
to the fence, it collapses the way
a balloon falls slightly between breaths.

The men on the ground pose for urns

or fountains, legs bent, arms curled.
They roll balls across the cool dirt
and that sound and the sound
of their feet tapping and of the slow
leak of their held wind sends
her skirt to ripple,
peas under cheesecloth,
pulse under skin.

Look how high I am

she says and they look over and up
the skirt and all the pictures
in their heads of women on swings,
corsetted or nude, hair always long,
unbraided, return the way each pump
brings her smell close then far,
the wrinkles in her lap close then far.

Higher
she calls until she is
over the yard and children.
She straddles the sky,
her sandals brush the trees. The men breathe
then release, breathe then release,

27
open their hands to catch her
where their heart hits,
where one breath catches the next,
beneath her skirt,
between her ankles.

28