Cabinet of Electric Silk

The curtain holds its breath:
two showgirls bracket a wooden hush,
their headpieces bright, feathers rigged.

Inside the cabinet, a woman is braided
to herself—rope learning her pulse,
sequins harvesting the stray blue light.
A blindfold presses its small moon on her brow.
Somewhere, a snare drum practises patience.
A cough from the stalls ticks; a wristwatch agrees.

They close the door like a book mid-story.
The lock answers in brass.
Static blooms in the grain—
a small weather in the oak.

We think the knife will come, or a panel of mirrors,
a rabbit lifted from a felt dark—
but the trick is quieter: hands rehearsed for years,
the swapped knot, the breath counted under the cymbals,
the sisters’ palms—left, right—steady as metronomes.

When the lights flare, she is elsewhere:
not vanished, but lent—
a glint on their wrists, a thread in the footlights,
two feathers trembling at the same time.

Every theatre has its pact with disbelief.
Tonight it is signed with lipstick,
with rope that loosens like good advice,
with a woman stepping from the box
already the rumour she leaves behind.