“Jubilee Writes to Ten-Cent Pearl on the Ambassador Motel’s Complimentary Stationary” by Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis
Fall 2007, Volume 31, Number 2
What a sad winter, my God! What a sad winter! An orange petticoat hangs a pink dust cloth and it’s raining.
- Miltos Sachtouris
Recalling how whole Cincinnatis slept while we wandered around in the so-late-it-was-early-again new snow smother of January. January, cold to the bone, January. I confided I know he’s left town because the city feels like a collapsed lung. I pointed to the tree in the row of trees needle-bare and paired off with streetlights as if they were waiting for a square dance to begin. I was there when I knew he’d be in the corner store. I was there, then I felt him before I saw him.
You talked about the novelist, the one you’d written a hundred poems or more for and on St. Valentine’s Day I’ll see you talking to him and your face will look like a young girl face-open and hopeful as your name, Pearl. But I grow ahead of myself now. Because it’s still January and the street is as stopped and serene as a snowglobe village and there’s no one wide awake as we are and we’re laughing like we might have laughed before Eve found a tree not dissimilar to this and before she or God or the whole world bit us and before we learned to bite back. I’m alone now, Pearl. Alone the way you are after you find what you love most in the world and then lose it. I’ve lost it, Pearl. Cities and scripts and they’re asking me to make them laugh, my Lord, isn’t that a riot, though?
Hear me out, Pearl, you with your dead gathered-up like flowers, this will be our winter, coldest cold and pressing. That tree won’t soon forget us–not the low branch where we pressed our foreheads side by each and you said we’re winter fruits, we’re the smoking apples of winter while our breath hung washcloths for ghosts and that eyelash snow blinked in our hair and we hung by our foreheads while no one walked by unaware and I didn’t write his name in the fresh paper snow and you didn’t erase it away and it wasn’t sad just then, and your book of names was growing and the things you loved out-numbered what you didn’t trust for a minute or two. Tonight I’ll stare at a motel room wall in Sandusky, and wonder where you’ve gone, where you, Pearl, cousin to no small well of snowbanks, kin to no glass-eyed gaze from a frozen fountain, think you’re going. High-step-ten-cents-a-dance-Pearl, you’re the girl with the leather-tough, weatherbeaten heart. Your name bends moonlight to its will, turns satin the milk-thistle. You’re about to stumble forward into new forgettings, but how can you know that now? If you see your cousin somewhere between here and where he left me last, tell him I’m more wide-awake than I ever meant to be. Tell him I’ll see him his lost sleep. I’ll be staring this dead-eyed at the motel walls in Abilene, in coldest St. Cloud. You’ll be sweeping the floor of the dairy into the next day and everything’s still sweet and frozen around us and the light this hour will come up clean and pure as skim milk, thin as an angel’s curse. I’m starring in a show no one would ever audition for and I can’t for the life of me, step off-stage. Pearl, your lines are a kick-line of footlights and broken bones, a perfect choreography of sky-spit and half-belief, the residue of prayer and the certain sin of love. Whoever reads you reads you wrong if they don’t know that when you say mouth you mean wound and when you say wound you mean father and when you say father you mean dead and when you say dead you mean him again, but when you write love you mean it as a question, when you are mean you are risking little which is your way of saying something about a garden and the hands that grow there like a good crop and the stones that mark them with the names you haven’t been able to read aloud for fear of waking the birds who sleep in the slim alphabet of branches where one serene January two ripe winter apples hung for a second smoking and burning, burning and unhurt.
Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis’ work has appeared most recently in the Los Angeles Review, Mid American Review and Green Hills Literary Lantern. Her story, Sundress, was selected by Stephen King as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2006. Jubilee Writes to Ten-Cent Pearl is from her manuscript Aloha Vaudeville Doll and is dedicated to the extraordinary poet Stephanie Rogers.