And Their Legs Wrapped In White

Tell me about the tattoos on your feet.

I was once a slender attorney at a great and powerful firm. Tropical plants hung in the atrium with grieving birds around and beneath. We were meant to swim twice a week. Each Thursday by diminishing lottery they selected an attorney to stand above all the attorneys waving a rabbit’s foot collected by the firm’s founder when in 1902 he missed a great bear hunting in what would become Alaska and instead nicked off a rabbit’s foot into a patch of yet unstudied primordial moss, so the story went, and we would hold the foot aloft and name every judge we’d won a case before and anyone in the crowd who’d also won a case before this judge would pound their bare heels on the floor like a rabbit above the warren and in another part of the building the birds would start calling.

And those across your hands?

For thirteen years I kept a flat overlooking the southeast corner of the park and for seven of those years on the sidewalk a man named Lancy sold framed Chinese newspapers heralding events in Chinese history that no American would know unless they had a reason. One afternoon Lancy and I were discussing sacred beadworks from forgotten cultures when a woman demanded Lancy sell her flowers. Lancy had no flowers of course and she approached with such fury I prepared to call the police but Lancy in his way plucked a begonia poking from the fence and handed it to her, where she in turn handed him a crumpled piece of paper with only the words Seeking Draft and disappeared behind some horses.

But your dress.

My sisters will wear the patterns too, all five of us, each of us also with punctuation beneath our ears. Mariposa the question mark. Colibrí the exclamation point. Orquídea the ampersand. Cielo the brackets. And our masks. Mariposa the question mark. Colibrí the exclamation point. Orquídea the ampersand. Cielo the brackets.