Henrietta Remembers
by: J. Bruce Fuller & Ana Spann

She blots on the carnival talcum, shared
With the clowns and the trapeze girls.
The brush, a yellowed fistful of horsehair,
Smells of her tobacco brand, greasepaint
And the Bossman’s tin can of pomade.
It catches a hiccup on her eye, tugs where
She knows lay before unlined.
A twig of smoke on the mirror, and her
Sight blows open like untied tent flaps in rain:

“That one time he buried quilts
in the woods, left notes to follow
I thought I could work it out
but he lost me in his enigmas.
The quilts were for my comfort he said
a picnic in the woods and I was ready
to hear him out.

“I thought I could figure him
but he said I asked too many questions.
He found me wandering in circles
and took me there in the rotting compost.

“He dragged me to the hole he dug
and I saw the quilts laid in the bottom.
For your comfort he said.

“There was blood caked in the corner
of my eye and I looked up to see a man,
scarred and dirty and holding a satchel
full of knives. My date was strung up,
pinned to the tree by three knives so silver
you would swear they were mirrors.
This new man asked me if I would like to
accompany him farther west, where he had
a job waiting, he said he was in need of
an assistant. Well I had nothing holding
me up, not like that cuss hung up on
that tree, so west we went.”

She tapped a pat of ash in the belly
Of a brown-tarnished tray, snuffed
The embers on her steady arm.