The Room With the Radium on the Shelf (Lise Meitner)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
The sheet music
on the vanity
has two melodies

The one on top
is in E flat
and the audience
will hear it tonight
in the third row
where the German attaché
is sitting
with his wife
and a glass
of something
he believes
he deserves

The one underneath
is in invisible ink
and it contains
the locations
of airfields
and the movements
of divisions
and it will cross
the border tomorrow
pinned
to the inside
of a garment
the border guards
will not ask
a famous woman
to remove

She is applying lipstick
She is memorizing
troop positions
She is doing both
with the same mouth
and the mouth
has been practicing
this particular
dual performance
since St. Louis
where the dual performance
was called
survival

[Chorus]
The spotlight
is the best disguise
ever invented
because no one
suspects the woman
in the light
of being
the woman
in the dark

And the woman
in the light
is so bright
so sequined
so impossibly
present
that the documents
in her clothing
become invisible
the way stars
become invisible
at noon —
not absent
just outshone

[Verse 2]
She left a country
that would not
let her
sit at a counter
and arrived
in a country
that put her
on a stage
and the stage
and the counter
are the same
piece of furniture
measured differently
by different
zip codes

She danced
in a skirt
made of fruit
because the fruit
was the price
of the freedom
and the freedom
was the stage
and the stage
was the first room
she had ever entered
where her body
was the argument
and the argument
won

And when the war came
she said:
this country
made me
what I am
and the what-I-am
is not
negotiable
and the not-negotiable
included
the dying
if necessary
which it almost was
three times

[Bridge]
She brought
twenty-eight suitcases
and a menagerie
across the Mediterranean
because the more
conspicuous
the travel
the fewer
the questions

The pet monkey
on her shoulder
was the decoy
The sheet music
in the trunk
was the weapon
The famous smile
at the customs desk
was the lock pick

And the officers
who searched her
found only
what she wanted
them to find:
a woman
too glamorous
to be
dangerous
which is
the oldest
miscalculation
any uniform
has ever made
about any
woman
in a dress

[Final Chorus]
The spotlight
is the best disguise
ever invented

She stood
at the marble steps
in the city
she was born in
twenty years
later
in a military uniform
and opened
her famous mouth
and what came out
was not
a song

It was the sentence
the counter
had refused
to serve her:

I have walked
into the palaces
of kings and queens
and I could not
walk into a hotel
in America
and get
a cup of coffee
and that
made me
mad

And when she got mad
the whole world
heard it
because the mouth
that carried
the invisible ink
across the border
was the same mouth
that opened
at the March
and the opening
was the second war
she won
with the same
instrument

Two kinds of notes
on the same page
One to entertain the room
One to liberate it

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