Dale Tracy

CLOSET DRAMA

This is a script for performance.

The blocking is in your palm

or punch.

The dialogue goes like this:

I see you are playing at living a story.

How many levels in?

This is a closet drama in nested acts.

Open the door. Take the string from the hanger

where mittens drape, justly balanced.

Put your hands inside. When pleased, clap.

Wait to be entertained or be two puppets 

eating up the stage of shucked shunned shirts, 

one hand reliable, the other the clown

who seeks love so hard it falls on its knitted tail.

Be the delighted audience. Revoke your love

when the clown tries the fall again.

This is how it ends:

How many doors did you open? 

Can you close them again?

With those mittens on your hands?





Dale Tracy’s mini-chapbook, What It Satisfies, is published by Puddles of Sky Press. Her writing has appeared in Arch-l’Arc, illiterature, and Artfest Ontario’s Canada’s 150th: Who We Are, Where We Are and Where We Need to Be Going. She lives in Kingston and teaches literature and culture at the Royal Military College of Canada.