RUTH MADIEVSKY

Fountain

Jardin des Tuileries, May 2013


Sitting beside this ancient gray
fountain, I’m thinking that you are probably
alive somewhere in the world,
and I don’t know how I feel
about that. You’re tightening
the screws of a run-down swing set
in an apartment complex in Hollywood
and winking at the girls
who are waiting on the grass for you
to finish: girls with Lisa Frank notebooks
in their backpacks and macaroni and cheese
in their teeth, girls who
don’t even have breasts yet,
girls with mothers
who fishtailed their hair
before school that morning and fathers
who won’t let them see
PG-13 films. Or maybe
you’re eating a peanut butter sandwich
in a prison cell, peeling away the crust
like a bitter store clerk
tearing the dress off a mannequin. You’re buying
extra-small thongs at Victoria’s Secret. You’re sinking
your nails into the skin of a peach.
You’re licking your fingers. I think
I need to stop thinking. I think this fountain
is made of the same material as tombstones.
I think that if you ever
met the moon, you would
grab her by the throat.


  
146 The Paris-American

Originally from Kishinev, Moldova, Ruth Madievsky lives and writes in Los Angeles. She studied creative writing and biology at the University of Southern California, where she received the Edward W. Moses Creative Writing Prize for fiction and the Phi Kappa Phi Student Recognition Award for her poetry chapbook-in-progress. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, The MacGuffin, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and Atticus Review. She is a graduate student at USC's School of Pharmacy. 

---

  Next week's poet:

 Casey Thayer