Alcatraz, Mars
They call us a citadel
in a blueless bay—
singular, like
a snowglobe’s stark
figurine: grottos washed
white as moons’ winter
stomachs, something
chiseled out of rib.
What they dreamed up
again, in that old Roman
way: the ruined cake
of the Coliseum
reborn, forever
in the bulwark’s grip.
The air here wants
to close us in. O riprap
memory, you are heavy
with salt. I can’t breathe
in this birdless bay.
When it comes to cruelty,
they are always wrong—
the old and new
masters, the same keys
cluttering the ring. Hear
the men and women kept
in waxing, separate hives.
On my pillow, I leave
a soap-carved likeness
of my face,
locks of my own
clipped hair.
With a fork and spoon
I slit the roof.
My leaving shadow
is blue-black, ragged
as the folds of a wing.
Fearing, again, the swiftness
of my body,
the guard fires
from his crow’s nest—
each shot useless,
muted as a feather
would be, in this air—
tell him I married a wave,
broke through
each cloud ceiling. Gasped
as I hoped
for heaven’s thin,
something blue
above the ladder. This gunmetal
smell on my hands.
Lolita’s Mars Rover Ballad
So this dune buggy trip
leaves me all rotten
inside. I’m sick of learning
landforms: dried-up lakebeds,
sore in their salts, all my wants
under haze and burned-up rubber.
Between winks of sleep, I see
canyons in split pastels
(my half-eaten jawbreakers),
pink clouds drifting above, bored
as a flock of sheep. I’ve re-counted
my bottle caps, pressed my lips
to glossy magazines. I taught myself
how to peel bananas with my feet.
So what? It’s a free country. I think.
But all time is stuck. I’m twelve
now and forever. I turn and turn and turn
but there’s nowhere else to go.
O Wow. More desert. Motels
crop up like mushrooms,
then poof. Long-legged,
neon signs erase themselves
behind the ugly dust devils.
Dress me up as another Dorothy,
braids, I guess, and dirty blue
gingham. Trade my **** again
for something made of candy.
A frontier ought to be exciting
things: cities made of windows,
secret red rock caves. Right now
I want more records. To get
myself a dog. Own a hothouse
where the sugarcane sways
like a bunch of girls dancing to the radio.
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Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers is the author of CHORD BOX (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Missouri Review, FIELD, Crazyhorse, Washington Square Review, Guernica, and many others. A 2012-2014 Kenyon Review fellow in poetry, she now lives in New Orleans, where she teaches at Tulane University.