Guarding her bent shopping cart,
heaped high with the spoils of war,
Slant Joan, chainmail smoking,
gives the straight skinny on her and Leonard.
"It was HoJo's, not the Chelsea Hotel,
and the raincoat wasn't really blue,
just see through," she confides.
She'd been in marketing before
this smudge pot pyre took her over.
Even angel-eyed French girls
can be made to advertise, hawking purity like soap.
Consumers flocked like city pigeons
to feed on sound bites of her inflected glory.
Every crusade was an ad campaign.
Catchier slogan, a flashy banner,
saints as celebrities pitching jihad for God.
Religion as marketing ploy until the background singers
drowned out reality's static thrum.
Joan still remembers chansons de guerre
roared around campfires, ecstasy chants rampant
in her blood even now. The broken sword they laid
beneath her broad peasant feet did not surprise her
but, inhaling the last drag on a bummed cigarette,
she feels the world receding beyond bitter waters
and blames her martyrdom on her gender.
"Dead or crazy. It's all the same to me and God.
No stranger than Lenny becoming a monk, eh?"
Carrion crows circled her corner pyre in a wry ballet, pitiless,
and she recalls floating acrid, receding like the holy voices
she never wanted to hear, the visions she never asked for,
the convenient gratitude of princes and pop stars.
"Listen to the wrong voice, wear the pants,
take someone down by the wrong river
and pigeons come to crap on your bones."
Arching one perfect Joan Crawford eyebrow,
she shrugs and mumbles,
"You'd hear voices too."
First Published in Issue 30 of Gravity:
A Journal of Online
Writing, Music and Art, December 1999
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, 1999
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