Daniela Olszewska

Jane walks in

and the sky thickens

with frog.

I’m going to need you

to dumb that drink

down for me.

Love me; love my crutch.

A yellow goes out of her

lumbar puncture wound.

I’d describe Jane’s look

as vaudeville minus

the animal acts.

As milk bar meets

extragalactic defector.

But this isn’t Warsaw, baby.

And Jane isn’t being coy.

When she says she wants

to be alone, she doesn’t mean with you.

Our Jane has been

messing up/dressing up.

She has been tampering

with our time

-honored recipe

for catholicons.

Abject sunning/mooning.

Jane has been unintentionally

scarleting the place unto itself.

Gargoyle encirclement.

Again, a stranger rushes up

to Jane, mistaking her

for a long-lost love.

Co-morbid stratagems.

Jane says, this heart isn’t

big enough for the both

of us.  She means,

I’m not looking

to be somebody else’s

other woman.  Again,

she is always lording/ladying

it over us.

We caught Jane with the help

of earnest accessory.

Her days as furnace holder

attenuated until breach of.

She was violently parapsychologic.

Improbably ptomainic.

Her bailiwick delineated.

Though still, she had no more

wheels than a pogo stick.

In the course of interrogation,

we learned that Jane has many tells.

In front of a live studio audience,

her mouth loses its Sphinx farm,

turns more Ferris wheel screw.

Daniela Olszewska is working towards her MFA degree at the University of Alabama.  She is the author of two chapbooks, The Partial Autobiography of Jane Doe (dancing girl press, 2008) and Resort to Humming (Scantily Clad Press, 2008).