The Science of Illusion

Chelle Miko

Assistant Wanted: Must be beautiful, glamorous,
charming, sexy . . . without upstaging the magician.
Must fit into small boxes and holes. 
California Service Center

She is bound. Sometimes at the waist
with hidden strings, pulled taut like a piano’s,
but of whalebone and steel, wrenched, with fingers laced
to a bedpost, legs anchored to the floor, to make six inches of
     her
disappear, to make new, more pleasing curves appear.

Sometimes at the feet, with cotton strips or silk,
after resistance is crushed
like bones with a hammer, the arch driven skyward,
and her toes embedded
in her sole, so she is no more
than five inches from the heel, an erotic stumble
and sway of hips across the bedroom floor: san zun jin lian,
three inches of golden lotus. The cast is set. Poof!
Blooms spring from sleeves, rabbits flop from a hat
and her foot, unwrapped, turns into a hoof.

Sometimes at the head, an embroidered cap attached
to lattice work, stitched of gossamer silk, that leaves the lid
of eyes to open and close like a coffin but hides the rest of her
features; sometimes a black cape that ghosts her body,
head to toe, so she can walk unseen in broad daylight.
And sometimes in a flicker of moonlight, at the magic mirror,
she can see the curvaceous outline of her vanity, the table 
     of tricks
of the trade, containers of paint that make parts of her
invisible; that angle the rouged cheekbones, the line of lips,
the echo of eyes in shadow. Sometimes she’s the magician
who erases herself. She presses wax to make an arc of 
     her brow,
presses more wax to make less of the hair
that warms her pubis. She winds the bed sheets as if to suppress
what slopes and curves without restraint, and with a dramatic
      flourish,
she throws the wrap from her body
as if she were always bound
to be made less
beautiful.