1955 Rauschenberg Bed, by Lillo Way

Bed, by Robert Rauschenberg (USA) 1955.

1955 Rauschenberg Bed

Pull on a thread and the bed
unmakes itself.

Tug a stitch and initiate
an unquilting bee.

Last night your hair fell out
and scribbled all over the pillow,

mouse-gray head hairs
dangling white sheet threads,

each hair crossing out
fibres by fives.

You’ve left your stingray
mouth here too,

its bottom lip sticked
snapper red.

Down the covers slide mucus
blood and sunrays in a bedhead afterbirth,

past sheep white as sheets
against sky,

wagging their shirttails
behind them.

You’ve made your bed now
(hang it all) on the wall.

What a life we’ve slept here – hair
blood and sun in the sheep-blinking earth,

thick and glorious
in your wet-paint dreams.

Lillo Way

This poem first appeared in The Madison Review.

Lillo Way's chapbook, Dubious Moon, winner of the Hudson Valley Writers Center’s Slapering Hol Chapbook Contest, was published in March 2018. Her poem, “Offering,” is the winner of the 2018 E.E. Cummings Award. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in RHINO, Poet Lore, North American Review, New Letters, Tampa Review, Poetry East, Louisville Review, among others. Way has received grants from the NEA, NY State Council on the Arts, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for her choreographic work involving poetry. www.lilloway.com