Free Write 2 (week 7)

At the Audition

We’re running the second act, second scene.
She’s third step up and stretching to pick
a grape: embryo to four seeds now crunching
behind her belly ring. It’s a briar, spiny and stage left
the director knows no grapes, no trees and leans to his assistant,
“No belly rings.”

Old men pull the flies
that let in these spectacles,
swinging drops weighing in their calloused hands,
gripping the fire wall. The director strikes the grapes,
exits the girl stage right. Action stills
as black suits wheel statued dragoons
and the bottomless urn for escapes.
The people, the parts.

Offstage she’s acting, stretching for the green one:
tannic nugget all ballooned up and pulled tight,
and that ring in her center, the cork conditioning her age.
There’s a twitch in her cheeks when the four seeds
pop, her lipness muzzling the pyrotechnics.