"Wild Woman and the Piano Player"
It was in a dream she demanded
he go fetch those little affections hidden
after her mother’s death: five yards
of black lace, three wigs, and the six foot
lipstick palm tree left to die in their old apartment.
He was a nobody piano playing fascist
running after cheap adventures in cabarets.
With nothing to fear, she dragged him into her song,
an accomplice to burning vultures,
“The Most Beautiful Drowned Man In the World.”
It was difficult to find gigs playing ghost music
so he became psychic assistant to a private investigator.
They moved to Bangkok, where no one hated them,
and continued entertaining the dead. She took up farming
in her strapless gowns and occasionally landed work
at the Floating Cabaret in Patong Paradise district.
When Juan, a one-eyed gaucho, brought her Cinnamon
Myrtle, Esteban pushed his piano to the beach,
and never returned.
Nikkita moved to Barcelona and dated a bi-sexual rock star
before being cast in an Alejandro Amenábar film.
She won an Oscar and retired to work
at a Peruvian nunnery.
Esteban showed up dead on Carthage beach,
“bones weighty from the water,” taller,
much taller than red palm trees.
The wigs were secretly purchased online
by a Tunisian official having an affair
with an Egyptian transvestite.
© 2008 Sergio Ortiz
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