Literary Yard

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For Whom the White Chinese Ladies Lie

By: Aaron P. Meadows

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The white ladies will lay on plastic beds
laying prone for the sequin heroes’ blade
who by way of chisel, blade, and hammer
can make a hundred faces all the same.

The white ladies manage little to say
through bulb-lips over hand computer screens.
This they resign themselves in prayer like pose
like the fly beating its head against glass
unaware from there they cannot escape.

Pallid gals know that beauty manifests
in deformed breasts stuffed as a balloon sleeve.
It emerges after vacuum’s probing
spews congealed yellow matter into bags.

The bleached ladies wonder that their parents,
if WASP or Aryan, they wouldn’t need
chemical burns to wash black silk yellow,
painted lenses to brighten ebony pools,
or alabaster plaster shades too white.

The pale pearls lay only on pristine beds
Gucci, Louis, or Fendi sheets and spread
starfish limbs for the highest bidding man—
frothy beer-bellied smoky-lung taxman.

Who desires a species so bleached
it renders definite features bleak?
It is the man whose mountain of wealth
composed from that which was siphoned—
the blood of the working class’s marrow.

It is he who seeks to plop into her
bleached and molded plastic purified place—
the place where he buries the glutton’s guilt
pump by pump on every white lily.

I know why the white Chinese ladies lie
inside metallic luxury they cry
to repay the debt—a forfeited bet
that beauty from suffering could exempt.

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