Ruth's Lily
"Not a transplant candidate,"
is how they put it.
I'm the proxy this time,
I know livers are precious.
They don't see Ruth,
her Renaissance forehead,
her Lily of Paris coat
black-and-white houndstooth
swings like the sixties.
Sweet grapefruit breath.
Bette Davis diction,
Margo in All About Eve.
After the glass eye,
gruelling surgeries,
It's a bumpy ride,
darling, she'd say
in-between vodkas.
She was going blind.
I listen to Bach's Brandenburgs,
the Fourth is my lighthouse,
Ruth's favorite too.
But iTunes shuffles the
order, the starts,
the endings.
Nothing makes sense.
I let go of sense,
of the sense of sense.
Ruth's vintage Lily
floats down Fifth Avenue.
Never an end in sight.
Carla Sarett's recent work appears or is forthcoming in Blue Unicorn, The Virginia Normal, San Pedro River Review, Words and Whispers and elsewhere. Her novella, The Looking Glass, will be published in October (Propertius) and A Closet Feminist, a novel, is slated for early 2022 (Unsolicited Press). Carla lives in San Francisco.