If Veronika Wins the Prison Pageant.

Brown, Michelle Chan

If Veronika Wins the Prison Pageant

   they'll cut her sentence by three months.
   In the city today, they exhumed
   Lenin for the fifth time;
   Veronika's girlfriend taught her chess.
   The pieces are handmade from bread
   balls. Veronika's long nails prick
   the faces in. I sealed up
   all her lovenotes with my spittle.
   Before she left, we split
   our thumbs, pressed them together
   like dead flowers. Veronika's scar had the bigger smile.
   Veronika writes: Inside, a tube of Crest
   is worth 200 cigarettes.
   She taught me how to slice a spiral
   from the apple skin, eat it core & all.
   Each time she stood me up
   for the hoodlum down the road,
   I learned another word for traitor.
   Veronika complains about the meat, stringy tendons.
   She's turning thin enough to escape her skin.
   The potato's eye sockets disapprove of her dye job.
   Every day she scrubs the latrines, reads
   For a good time, call Gosha. I've had many
   Goshas in my day; can't say
   what sort of time. Veronika
   can recite the famous games play by play.
   Perhaps I kept my Queen too tight.
   For recreation, the prison girls chase lice.
   Veronika misses the smell of small flowers,
   the languor of the Black Sea.
   If I want to comfort Veronika, I'll tell
   her leisure is out of fashion
   in the city, & competition's all the rage--
   last I read, Ms. HIV
   was crowned with a tiara of lilies.