Revenant
       

A naked woman walks out of the water,
along the riverbank toward the lights of town.
All murders happen along this road.
She passes junked cars, tufts of long grass.
Twilight comes. Across town a carnival
begins to shut down on its last night.
The rides stop. People head for their cars.
It begins to rain. The woman walks
toward the closing carnival, forgetting
her death, the river water between
her toes, the jolt when the rock first
struck her and the hands that held her under.
No one can hear or see her
move along the dark streets and alleys.
As she walks, she touches her breasts,
discovers them the way a lover might.
She finds the carnival closed, thinks
the Ferris wheel looks like a dinosaur
stopping in the gray clouds and the rain.
She speaks to the pink and orange horses
of the merry-go-round, remembers
calliope music, turning and laughing.
She becomes a spinning, laughing girl.
In town a drunken man presses his face
against the window of a movie house.
The woman in the booth says the movie
already started. In a house at the edge
of the carnival pavilion, a family
sitting down to supper is interrupted.
The father thinks he sees ·someone outside
walking through the pavilion in the rain.
He leaves the table, takes his rifle
to scare whoever it is away. The drunk leaving
the theater decides to see the carnival.
He steps over the gate, takes a long pull
from the bottle in his pocket. The woman
walks between the stalls of the pavilion.
All murders happen along this road.
The man who wanted to see the movie
stumbles up the steps to the house of horrors.
He falls and does not move.
Beside the Ferris wheel, the father
with the rifle finds three teenage boys
touching themselves, passing a magazine.
The boys stare into his flashlight.
The rain stops. The woman watches them.
The wind begins to dry her hair, her mouth.
She tastes the boys, the father with the gun,
the drunk collapsed in front of the house
of horrors. All Murders, she thinks,
and the wind carries her among them.

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Copyright © 2015 Randolph Thomas All rights reserved
from The Deepest Rooms
Silverfish Review Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission