SUGAR SHIFT
      Tammy Peadon
      (Fast Forward)

They lived in the sin of a perpetual past,
three dim, heat-heavy rooms
encased them in the crumbling husk
of a brownstone on a forgotten side
of the city.

We ran suicide shifts down dead streets,
and some midnights found our pulsing
red and white outside their stoop,
spinning strobes slapping brick with
bright kisses.

He was the Phantom of the Opera, and
she was his Christine. She would rush us in,
blue eyes wet, wide in a thin plane.
Her scent reminded me of tabbouleh,
scallion sweet.

He was ancient, breath like smegma, face
like a leather mask. Cirrhosis of the liver ate
his body, drank his mind, accompanied by
strains of Wagner, low and unrelenting
drones of death.

While we worked, she hovered, a frail wasp
patting his brow, grasping his hands, humming.
I saw her hug herself, her saturate fingers
dripped panic down her back like slow,
crawling, sweat.

He was a wicked Raoul, hateful in his extremis.
He struck at her, called her a brainless zygote,
rotten whore. She gave him the radius of
her smile and crooned “Papa, papa,”
in dulcet tones.

We lifted him to the stretcher, stage direction,
take left; she cried when we strapped the
belts and clutched our sleeves with nervous
desperation. She made quiet, pleading noises
in a strange tongue.

They had been someone once,
He a producer of this, she an actress in that.
She had worn diaphanous gowns that clung
to her mons veneris, danced in hot abandon
for his pleasure.

We left her standing in the doorway on that
last night of our acquaintance, calling papa
in a pitiful litany that was at once beautiful
and sad, a picturesque recollection, another
shift on sugar hill.

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