[W]hen Liza Minnelli joins in
everyone stops singing.
It’s time to leave.
In the private elevator,
I disappear into
the lucky ladies
who can’t remember the way
to the rented house.
On the bus we lie to a nun
to get a better seat,
and the driver,
who’s onto us, totals
head-on
into a tree.
We arise like some
ruined contesssa
thrown from a balcony.
It’s too early to unzip
our leather leggings,
and we head to the tracks
where easy riders
lose everything
to three wrong girls.
We send the emcee
to the gallows,
but the songs
fall into the hands
of marching youth.
Only a face is seen.
Then a rainstorm,
because we left the water running,
because another heir
drowns in his jaccuzzi
wishing
he could be a part of us.

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a 2013 Canto Mundo Fellow and the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013). A Leopold Schepp Scholar at New York University, she won the Seth Barkas Prize for Best Short Story and The Thomas Wolfe/Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Best Poetry Collection. She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan where she earned her MFA in Poetry, and was a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Recently, her story “A Way out of the Colonia” won the Editor’s Prize for Best Short Story in Camera Obscura: A Journal of Contemporary Literature and Photography. A graduate of the 2010 Women’s Work Lab at New Perspectives Theater, her plays have been produced in New York City, Washington DC and Toronto. Her work appears in The American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Bayou, Puerto del Sol, among others. Rosebud is an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (vidaweb.org). Find out more about her at 7TrainLove.org