Dorothy's Hoax on Midtown -- Michelle Murphy

What's dangerous just seems that way. Dorothy's hoax comes with photos of you drunk in the Algonquin where the sand was so thick you were given up for dead. Why do people refuse to camouflage their shadows, jumping up to make notes on a face that's gone sharp, flattened by truth?

The world's on notice. Deep in its pockets, the eye's lonely journey works out its parameters, collides with other eyes.

Dorothy acquires concessions like successes, de-educating the oath, taking her gospel in hand. You knew her when. The introduction undermines possibility. Her kisses, a result of claims, debts to privacy and a preoccupation to future interviews.

She wears both weapons and currency. & you, a devotee of radio plays and a thousand miles from your original intentions, run the round table, grappling with hands exchanging words and money, retiring on beds clothed in the bliss of idiots savant, & waiting for her flagrant return.

The myth is a poor fuel without resources. My needs can only be replaced with faked conquests, like new shoes. Red crocodile heels, stilettos that mark impatient time on marble foyers. Granite colored straps that squander an ankle and hold the moods at bay.

Dorothy appears in large portraits and the restored luster of her youth follows her everywhere. Included in one page of her diary is a description of a nun who demanded a daily inspection of her finger nails, wrote Dorothy's vices out in long hand, and testified to her out & out refusal to tow the line.

All the while, a vertical sky built itself in your head, defying code, refusing to obey a homesickness that wasn't home. & ordained in waiting, you spoke of the movement that left her in babbles too difficult to explain to those un-ordained in the regressive mysteries of refusal. Pass through, she said from cities protected by machines, pass through this momentary lapse of memory.

See how the body falls, passing its rogue genes into the divine? Become men, she said, standing in the doorway, at ease, praising the overheard and accidental. Give up your lust for beginnings and bombs. Dance. Dance. She never danced. Unless allowed to do it her way.