Nancy McCabe ~ Three Poems

Last Living Woman in America to Get a Pedicure

Like some­thing hidden,
a speakeasy or rooftop garden
behind closed doors low voices
of cus­tomers at man­i­cure tables buzz,
male tech­ni­cians fac­ing them like speed
dates clip­ping and fil­ing instead of flirting,
pol­ish in bright can­dy col­ors lin­ing the walls
like decorations.

On thrones more women scroll phones
while men kneel, wash­ing a teenager’s
plump feet, a 40-something’s tanned ones,
the bony toes and ankles of an old­er woman.
Ticklish, they all hold back laughter
as tech­ni­cians wash feet, mas­sage legs,
insert pur­ple spac­ers for an undercoat
and two top­coats. A laugh escapes me,
the teenag­er sup­press­es a gig­gle and then
breathes out a guf­faw, anoth­er woman
snorts, and even the tanned woman is
chuck­ling and chortling and cackling.

Finally, my nails are like rose petals
or coquina clams just under the sand
in the surf, frag­ments of conch shells
glit­ter­ing in the sun. You like? the man­ag­er asks.
You come back? And I nod, though
I prob­a­bly won’t spare the time,
as much fun as it is to sit among laughing
strangers, pedi­curists look­ing as pleased
with them­selves as stand up comics
whose jokes have landed.

~

Flight Home

A white car­toon plane dan­gles before you
above the dark blue Pacific
and at 37,999 feet, time is just
anoth­er thing you made up.

At 5:25 the plane noses toward Juneau.
The flight atten­dant serves piz­za twists.
600 mph is so fast it feels like stillness.
You scroll across the earth

to Calgary, Des Moines, St. Louis, Nashville,
the Gulf of Mexico. Somewhere below,
your bread is mold­ing and a dog has knocked
over your trash. Ice melts in your dri­ve­way. It

is start­ing to be spring. Traversing pocked
apoc­a­lyp­tic roads, wind­shield wipers smear
bug guts. The stock mar­ket is crash­ing. Someone
has been sep­a­rat­ed from her child.

Far away from this and out­side of time, you swipe
the screen, tilt the plane, turn the earth.
Look at how easy it is, altering
the whole curve of the world.

~

Pennies and Hairpins

Taking apart the piano
we exca­vate pen­nies and hairpins
as if a long-ago lit­tle boy emp­tied his pockets,
pil­ing change on the key­board cover
before launch­ing into Clair de Lune
or Midnight Sonata, rolling and flowing,
coins clank­ing down into the piano’s innards.
Or maybe a lit­tle girl, pen­nies stacked on the
back of her hand to keep her wrist up
and fin­gers curved, plunked out the first
wist­ful notes of Fur Elise, sweep­ing her hand
through her long hair to fling it behind her,
pen­nies and hair­pins rain­ing down
before she hur­tled through a stormy, dra­mat­ic section.
I like to imag­ine this, the music and commotion
of my staid upright, silent for years and out of tune
by the time I moved into its house,
though most like­ly these items came from tip­toe­ing children
whose graves now slip down a near­by mountain,
pok­ing small objects into the gap between the fallboard
and keys, down into the instrument’s inter­nal mechanisms,
savor­ing the mys­te­ri­ous thrill and dread
of how things disappear.

~

Nancy McCabe is the author of nine books of prose, from a mid­dle grade and a young adult nov­el to sev­er­al mem­oirs for adult audi­ences. Her essays and poet­ry have appeared in North American Review,  New Ohio Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Salon, and Newsweek. Her work has received a Pushcart and been list­ed ten times as notable in Best American anthologies.