Tight-lines: the cats-eye, the lip-stain, the contour.
Lid of the eye and the snap-closed colour box.
The eye, smoked. The lips, plum and

overripe. The face, incandescent, in an ad,
circa 1930, for a radium cold cream, part
of a cosmetic line promising luminous

beauty. Seventy girls, hired to paint the faces
of watches carried into war. Told
the paint was harmless, they would lick

the brushes as they worked, $0.27 a dial;
would colour one another's nails and faces,
shut off the lamps and watch their bodies

fill with light. Years after, a radium girl
during a tooth extraction would find
a piece of her jawbone in the dentist's

gloved hand. She, unlike Samson, did not
have the consolation of a brawl, of a thousand
men dead, though her hair and strength had

gone, too, in that same instant. In the aisle
of the drugstore I find the shelves where
they hand my face back to me in pieces,

remembering their gifts: brow-bone an unlikely
burgundy, lips that marked glassware, shirt cuffs, collar-
bones. An eye infection that lasted weeks. Leaning

forward into mirrors with our mouths half-
open, as Jezebel must have before the dogs ate
off the face she had carefully put on. In our mirrors

reflections gave us surfaces we could touch. The blotter,
the lustre, the lips, the lisp that resisted
spot correction and would not blend. We knew, of course,

how we wanted to look at this instant
had been decided for us, not so long ago,
by men in a hall of mirrors. We were not fools. We

knew the temper of the palette, the press and the
shimmer. The brush, the balm, the compact, the
defect. The practice that made perfect.