corresponding voices

Orchestrated Moan

Pills dangle from every mouth at the opera house while I tell myself
to get out of the way, get out of the aisle, get out of my
own mind. I know the composers have sex, the orchestra, everyone up there.
I know by the disintegrating formula
in the smallest echo of vibrato, soprano an antonym of stutter,
no place safer than another.

Look, these performers have lost their heads, shrive
with patented mechanical instruments
only living when handled by a human being.
I am terrible in first person, a less-successful ornament
next to the hands of a woman pulling her mouth
open wide as advertisement.
She belts the Italian for “half the trouble you get into
comes from coming
,” our drug’s half-life, our wide-set pupils,
our performances, our aural and erotic poisons.

Goodbye powerful scales, I have been experimenting with tenderness
and I seem to have forgotten
what I wanted this poem to consist of,
love?

- Jessica Scicchitano