How
could you
get rid of them–the dance shoes
you enhabited? More and more broken
week after week, but take
a closer look at the bottom of the right
shoe with stitching at the seam
unraveling with each pirouette, loose threads
mimicking choreography with frames on each side
hugging your arches, the scuff
on the heel–a souvenir when the bruises
fade, a worn-down toe, as if sanded with a nail
file, not a twin but a neighbor you secretly
gifted more, the surface, decorated
in black dirt clouds, showing where bone came
closest to meeting the floor
below, but you’d rather them than empty
skies.
Ariya Bandy is a writer of poetry and fiction. Her work appears in The Creative Zine and elsewhere.
Comments