BLOOD
Eleanor
I
The way her jeans are ripped
it’s like she got shot in the knees
and you can almost hear the gun crack
and the medical fees were so high
that even after the stitches faded,
she couldn’t afford new denim.
And you can almost see the red gun tracers
aiming - red, red, red like the blood
that never fell on this pavement,
never flooded these flowers
because the holes in her jeans
were cut to showcase her spectacular legs
look like slim soldiers.
Stranger things than truth have happened here.
II
Across much more than the corner there is MIXED BLOOD.
Times New Roman, all caps, gracing the brick like lace.
It’s fantasy and fiction’s little mythology project.
And you wonder if vampires like it,
if gun tracers are more maroon than amaranth,
if mixed blood would flow through the streets like wine, like Sydney Carton’s, like a symphony.
But too often mixed is confused with broken
and broken things, broken knees, broken people want stitches
and stitches fade just like flowers, just like amaranth.