The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Love as Invasive Species by Ellen Kombiyil

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Side A

Ma wanted birthday lilies
so you stomped through snow
to the florist’s beige counter, tiled floor.
Tiger lilies. No dull

white for her, no pink tongue center
yanked fresh from a mountain path.
It was six years since Daddy
plucked the spark plugs and left.

Lilies you
nearly crushed
getting back,
bare legs bright red

like knuckles, simultaneously
snow-wet and bled. And stars in snowdrifts
glittered. Not stars but tiny crystals
moved as you moved down the block, a wave of stars

followed you home
and the stems
gone bent
and you not broken

Love as Invasive Species

Side B

The day the tarantula escaped, my uncle
joked, “The cage is empty.” He said it over cornflakes—
the rock fallen off, the mesh lid mysteriously askew.

He smiled and slurped and chewed.
We searched behind the couch cushions, among
piano hammers’ knotted strings, in the broom closet

with its scary duster. (How many days had he let it out
for a walk—crossing the afghan’s colored squares
draped across the backrest?) At night I dreamt it crept

across the headboard as I slept, scuttled clacks,
each foot a seed-hard talon, spilled tacks.
Gramma finally found it when shaking the sheets out:

black and lacy it sailed through the air,
then scampered under the bookshelf where it hid
then disappeared beneath baseboards.

The walls breathe with it now,
acrid, not unlike the air outside the zoo’s tropical house,
toucans dripping guano black as the berries they ate.

I coax it with felled moths, pheromones
exuding from their bungled heads
after all night blinging the bulb’s sexless filament.

Or I stun lightning bugs with a mosquito-zapping racquet,
sweep twitching bodies near the crevice, where I expect
long fingers to sense their way out, scoop the offering

into its mouth. Or I want it gone,
to know it’s no longer fingering up the walls,
its carcass a dropped glove I’ll bury in the yard

beside a house quietly erupting,
cupboards sagging with china plates,
identity papers locked inside a fireproof safe,

the last will and testament edited, crossed out,
signed in a wavering, unrecognizable hand
(the tarantula’s carapace slipping off,

mushrooms growing
where its abdomen once was), the bookshelves
collapsing, centipedes and their nymphs

thriving amid musty spines,
the loved and unread occupying the same space
inside their dead wood frames.

The cage is empty—I bring home a mate
and watch it sleep under the heat lamp,
tap at the glass, hoping

I’ll find a way to live again
grateful, tame
among the rocks.

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Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:

The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.

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