Claire poems
------ Karen Chamisso
1.
Claire giving tremendous blank looks
All that slut hauteur
Dior Red Vinyl on her lips
Claire in her bodycon bandage dress
15 year old Claire.
Up in the entertainment crib
Related Articles
She danced me around
“You’re gonna have to face it
you’re addicted to Claire”
- I’ve got the look.
It’s school rule time, she tells me.
We both study intently
The timeless timely things
Prince’s blue sky (avec nuages) frock coat
Annie Lennox’s quasi-tonte allure
And the models fakeplaying guitar
Behind Robert Palmer.
Put your gaze in the air like you just don’t care
And don’t care: it’s the most important part.
Darling, she would say,
we’re going to live in Berlin
where Claire had flown with her Mama
just last year. Darling, we called each other.
C’est chic, we would say
Excluding, say, some Gwinnet county import
Whose bouffant blonde above the pom-poms
Was just too rich a joke.
The entertainment crib – channel 69
From four to six. The pony pound you could see
From Claire’s windows.
The go-arounds of spring have left us all behind
Claire, darling, ghost, so kind, so unkind.
2.
Claire taught me the larger gestures
The kabuki theater of entrances and exits
In sky high boots at the Killer club
Sweeping into the backseat of the taxi at 2 a.m.
The seriousness at the center of silliness
A moral position, stoic,
Enduring the battering of ten thousand bragging boys.
Claire taught me the larger gestures but
Claire died. They dragged her body from the river.
She chose the largest exit. And though I see and feel
The moral position, I can only visit, stricken.
They buried her in Alpharetta.
Oh Claire. Honeychild.
