Lampshades
Judith Harris

They were feminine as curtsies,
hour glass-shaped,
made out of canvas, and stretched
like corsets over the pole
of the lamp’s mahogany trunk.

It took three clicks
to light them up,
like three wishes,
light, and lighter, and brightly light.
They aged like parchment,
and gave us a curious sun to read by,
even in the darkest night,
when we should be sleeping,
not awake, not looking.

Ours was in the basement.
It said: “Caution Combustible.”
Sallow as butter, iron-scorched
while heating up on the daintiest linen,
braced by wires,
frilled as a bride’s dress,
now fading to rust.

And I remember the day
I found out about skin shades
made out of people,
and I imagined them,
rolled out like white dough,
or the pelts of rabbit fur,

how the Frauleins ran their fingers
under the treadles of their
sewing machines,
careful to circumnavigate
the blue ink numbers on the soft,
inside of the handless wrists,
This curtain, this gassed bell,

that circles the wiry bald
skull, an inmate
of electricity
and skittery tonsils…

Who knows how the lampshade, dances
around itself,
like a bear in a hula-hoop,
or a perverted moth,

unable to break its attraction
to what would spin it
alive, banging,
and jangling it,
into circles of flame?