Mira's submission for Monday, February 4th

Stephen Dunn

Belly Dancer at the Hotel Jerome


Disguised as an Arab, the bouzouki player
introduces her as Fatima, but she’s blond,
midwestern, learned to move we suspect
in Continuing Education, Tuesdays, some hip
college town,
We’re ready to laugh this is Aspen
Colorado, cocaine and blue valium
the local hard liquor, and we
with snifters of Metaxa in our hands,
part of the incongruous
that passes for harmony here.
But she’s good. When she lets her hair loose,
beautiful. So we revise:
summer vacations, perhaps, in Morocco
or an Egyptian lover, or both.
This much we know:
no Protestant has moved like this
since the flames stopped licking their ankles.
Men rise from dinner tables
to stick dollar bills where their eyes
have been. One slips a five
in her cleavage. When she gets to us
she’s dangling money
with a carelessness so vast
in art, something perfected, all her bones
floating in milk.
The fake Arabs on bongos and bouzouki are real
musicians, urging her, whispering
“Fatima, Fatima,” into the mike
and it’s true, she has danced the mockery out
of that wrong name in this unlikely place,
she’s Fatima and the cheap, conspicuous dreams
are ours, rising now, as bravos.