Stopping by Frederick's on a Foggy Evening

She wants her every breath to matter,
life piquant as a good first line,
the sound of the sea in every room.
Her hair smelling of mangoes and
pomegranate, her sex of Api Etoile
apples and Ballerina roses. Medici-red.
She wants the Maitland-Smith four-poster
fringed with Noguchi lamps and the men
in her life, those seemingly-organic
shapes, insubstantial and wispy as clouds,
ephemeral as love. She dreams of cornices
and minarets, the Pulaski dresser’s surface
littered with Moroccan fig candles, vintage
embalming equipment, Papillon daffodils
in Sapporo bottles. The burgundy velvet
walls dripping in Bettie Page prints,
Massaccio‘s "Madonna Enthroned,"
a Siouxsie and the Banshees resplendent
in all their fuck-you bravado. She wants
her love life as deliciously ambiguous
as Bierce, as grayly surreal as Enrico,
and glisteningly decadent as Cocteau.
A vintage ’50s pink nylon baby doll
nightie to trace the shimmering intaglio
of her desire, cradled by a cerulean
chiffon peignoir, soft as the inside
of her wrist. Most of all, her womb
to stop seeming like the single cracked
Versace Medusa flute on the serpentine
mahogany roll top. Empty, useless,
scarred with the tiniest of hairline
fissures. Its flesh-pink glaze
dimmed by dust.