His eyes silver over with tears
In the rich velvet of the empty theater, empty
Except for her, empty
Even next to her, empty
The gossamer beam of the projector,
Casts its sheer pale ray above their heads,
Cutting through the milky blackness
With a full emptiness,
Color condensed into a blank beam,
Like light passing through a prism, it catches only smoke
And the faint dull floatings of dust motes,
And the unspoken words that drift above their heads
Like unwanted children.
Violins swell, and on screen
The leading lady flings herself from a cliff,
Her white skirts fan out like full magnolias,
Failed parachutes billowing impotently in the wind.
Violins swell, and off screen
He stares at her, studies the sheer summit of her profile,
Waits for her to turn, to look at him, but she won’t
Because she knows that if she does
He’ll kiss her.
Roo Singleton Roo Singleton is a young, nonbinary, New Orleans-based essayist and poet. They are a senior in the Creative Writing Department at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, a National Honor Society Inductee, a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and an aspiring journalist. They’ve been published three times in UMBRA, and short-listed for the Faulkner award. They believe that in our current, late-stage capitalist society, creation is a revolutionary act in and of itself, and they aim to use their writing to illuminate truths about the systems under which we live, and dispel even just a little of the darkness that looms on the horizon.
