Getting dressed up in the evening,
spangles on her blue dress glittering
in the bathroom light, she gave the mirror
a maroon lipstick kiss,
lush happy petals on the glass.
For just a moment she stepped out of time
and dizzily saw herself
and her friends, strangers, all dancing
in the disco strobes, forever
as roses snowed from the ceiling.
She glimpsed a bearded and coated man shivering
in the hot Tel Aviv night,
his eyes bright with something unnameable,
his mind frozen, seeing his God's sky so full
of stars, faces - in his last moments, he realized
it was as if he had never lived until now.
She shook her head and wondered.
She wasn't a girl who saw visions.
She wiped the lipstick rose
from the mirror, and walked into a future
of ball bearings and bones and nails;
to become the impossibility of beauty.
To be the blooming of a blood flower
in a bed of bodies and flame.
Original work, dedicated to the young men and women who died in a suicide bomb attack outside a disco in Tel Aviv, June 2001