S, M, L, XL

Saraband of anagrams, symbols bow
and curtsy. Stain, take satin by the hand

and wheel her round like a two-stepping two-
timing man. Soon we’ll outfit that old Raft

of the Medusa with a disco ball
and a slippery dance floor. Silk and velvet

silhouettes, cold-rolled camisoles, rubber
g-strings: tweaked underwear as outerwear.

How to find an inside without an outside?
Where being trapped is pleasant. Road signs

zoom us smartly towards the efficient
pursuit of the irrational, yet SATAN

still gets spelled SATIN by bright angel-
dusted teens wielding spray cans. Their shiny

self-esteem inflates, bursts, shrivels in locked
black bedrooms. Aesthetic absolutes prove

relative under pressure: Cousin Mort
sawing away at a fiddle, trying

to make love to Mozart but paying cash
for a quick blow on the street instead, for

instance. The corrosive hysteria
of such facts flaunts our best wishes. Don’t mind

Truth, she’s puking in the bathroom, Beauty
retorts in her offhand way, still smoking

despite tooth stains. A thought hurled by cesta
into the future might boomerang

and explode our woozy architecture:
a lava pool of steel and concrete spalling

towards the kind of big mess history teaches
in school. Memorize the dates by test time.