If you spill red wine, smoke a pack of Gauloises, and piss on the rug, it's exactly like Paris. — Pam Perry

I believed in Queen Elizabeth's sixteen white horses
after Saturday nights at slumber parties spent shining
a light into the sleeping eyes of the youngest girl,
trying to impress those horses into her subconscious.
We were fourteen.

I lean on my clipboard, waiting, drinking coffee.
Radios blare.
The sun on yellow concrete amplifies
the technicians' Hawaiian shirts.

Movies are made of artificial danger.
A 12,000 watt lamp coming on with the sound of the sun
falling into a zinc washtub cannot cast more light
than the car, rigged to roll
on a street downtown, which casually shatters
when the charge goes off.

This will not appear on the screen:
the hood peeling away in strips.
The blood blooming on the shirts
under the shrill of metallic birds
suicidal against the building across the street.

The fluorescent tubes over my son's incubator
when he was five days old, and blindfolded,
flooded out the weak beam of the flashlight
glinting off Nancy's eyes, suggestive behind blonde lashes,
as we incanted: Queen Elizabeth has sixteen white horses.

Some quality of belief mattered
more to us than the exact number of royal horses.
When we asked in the morning,
Nancy would push back her buttery hair
and answer: Queen Elizabeth has sixteen white horses.
That never happened.