Allison Adair
Rose Garden at Villa Grimaldi
FORMER DETENTION CENTER, SANTIAGO, CHILE
Not one bud can help
shredding into pastel velvet.
Ripe melon. Sorbet of blood
orange. Piña flayed with pink raw
as a woman’s many mouths.
The dog, in its stiff pulsing,
must have sensed the strange
romance of this rose-musk.
How long after a rat enters
the body do its claws graze bone
and when does the imagination turn
back, afraid of dreams without mercy?
Across the courtyard, men hang,
intestines looped like sausage chains.
The tree has no name, only
heavy, fed, vast as a world.
Its green crown staggers,
clicking with parrots.
Most sing. Some shout.
Some are silent, some wail.
Allison Adair lives in Boston, where she teaches at Boston College and Grub Street. Her recent poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, FIELD, Ninth Letter, and Subtropics, among other journals, and will be included in this year’s Best American Poetry anthology.