The woman supports a child in one hand and a trumpet in the other. She beats her soul into a bowl with sugar and melting butter. She adores cats, calculus and turning cartwheels. She reveres all the women who were hanged, beaten or stoned to death throughout history’s scandalous ode to justice. Yet duty is a snake, and the charmer is always female. The woman’s son is limping, she must save him from a fall even as the piano lid bangs open and spills bewitching melodies. Who entered her for this life-long series of auditions? She loves to stitch rejection notes together; converts condescension into floor covering. She will never submit to the fangs of bias, the trash-talk of the bigot. She whisks up a new language that can sear and soothe before it is understood, that — without warning or permission — flares into restive song. Invention is porous; transparency can be false; falsetto isn’t a male domain. She paints bold lyrics on cracked glass, gives throat to broken words. The woman holds a to-do list in one hand, lifts a galaxy with the other.