MAIA ARMISTEAD
Invitation
Invite me out. Invite me in. I might not go
but I will give it serious thought. Inaction
holds every possibility but action means
you might start that great shiver up my spine.
Don’t touch me or try to hold my hand!
Don’t let the clouds continue their slow,
noseward procession. If ever there was
a perfect moment I have made it for you,
paused on the edge of a neon-pink sunset,
framed romantic in my doorway as the sun
spins out like a CD. Don’t ask me what
I think about art. I hate it. I hate to think
about ice-skating in Central Park, carving
giant letters into the artificial lake. Nothing we do
should be seen from the sky. When I write
I am mouthing fog into your bathroom mirror.
Maybe on a cold morning you will see
what I have left for you.
Grapefruit
You tell me you forgot to lock the door
while segmenting grapefruit with eerie precision.
This place is wide open to the world, which used
to make me afraid, made me imagine things where they weren’t,
silent faces watching through figured glass.
In the morning it’s okay. We let the sun in and cast
the fireplace ash into the fresh open air winding with tūī.
We sprinkle sugar on the grapefruit and gnaw seeds
from bread. You are so practiced. Your spoon scrapes the fruit
but leaves the rind pure, stood holding what’s no longer there.
I make a mess of my breakfast, scrape my tongue along
the sharp edges and shake the tablecloth crumbs
into the garden. Last night you forgot to lock the door.
I entered your room and found my photograph on your dresser
turned to face the wall. I wonder why you kept it there at all.
Later, tracing the indents where the Christmas tree once sat,
I imagine the plastic needles rustling over me, taken, suddenly,
by a need to hide and be hidden by a semi-natural thing.
For much of your life you possessed incredible beauty.
You had ballet shoes, your hair fell straight and endless —
I don’t look like you. As a child I became a woman,
which frightened you, all those elegies on my skin. I didn’t mean
to scare you, I just got lost behind the door — had to bang
and scratch to find my way out, kept my jaw wired shut
as the black, viscous sand washed in with the long night.
It is so beautiful here, the sky brilliant red, the sun low and dripping,
but it makes me so afraid. We are so wide open to the world. You
have opened all the doors. You have fed the perfect yellow fruit
into my mouth.
Maia Armistead is a poet and student originally from Hamilton. She has been published in such places as Starling, Mayhem, Sweet Mammalian, a fine line and The Spinoff. She is one of the founding editors of Symposia Magazine.