13: "Up / Down" by Jamie Kazay (Saturday, July 18)

after looking at Bauhaus Stairway, by Oskar Schlemmer

I stalk.
I lie,
say I don’t.
Say I don’t mind
being close on this stairway
where degenerates merge
into mass transit as tenuous as paper.

For others Stairway is image.
Just image?
Backs of heads
moving up
/ down
one-way to nowhere,
where body is screen, agape like mixed messages.

I wear orange shirt,
loathe orange—
its relations with pumpkins and Halloween
and _______________ in scary movies
follow compulsory wince and eventual taunting:
One, two, Freddy’s coming for you.
Three, four, better lock your door.

Five, six, grab your crucifix.
Seven, eight, gonna stay up late.
Nine, ten, never sleep again.
Yes, I’m older now.
But, it was summer,
daddy let me stay up late
with shadows in 1989’s living room,

fear was transcendence.
Blood ceiling ends flashback.
I feel about memory
what I feel about moving
up / down a stairway.
Thirteen more steps in this color carnival
for mischief makers in white shirt, black shirt, and blue.

* * *

Jamie Kazay was born in Hollywood, and grew-up in Pasadena, California. She relocated to Chicago for graduate school in 2005. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from California State University, Northridge and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College, where she teaches writing. Her poems have appeared in Northridge Review, Wicked Alice, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the Development Manager at Alcuin Montessori School, and enjoys researching Virginia Woolf.

To view Oskar Schlemmer's "Bauhaus Stairway," please click here: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=80049.