Let’s say beauty can be calculated
like the weight of air or the ink in pens.
If the dictator marks his face at night,
an indication that he’s grown
into his moustache, then he will
fail at becoming a lumberjack—
will subsequently apply for compensation.

Let’s say beauty equals the thump
of your coffee-colored heart. You need
milk and sugar now more than ever.
You need the cut-off shorts, tan arms,
skinny legs, a marginally expensive pet—
your green-tailed sunbird, matched
to your grand grand marquis.

Let’s say you hardly made the deadline
to get your braces removed,
you waited all these years to pawn
those frosty whites for oranges.
You need them now, more than ever,
nitrate-free batwings to cover your eyes—
your thick, black fuel encrusted eyes.

*

Elena T Tomorowitz is associate editor of the Mississippi Review and graphic designer for Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction. She has poems appearing in Guernica, Used Furniture Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, ILK, Blue Earth Review, Barn Owl Review, and others. She spends her time between Boise, Idaho and Hattiesburg, Mississippi.