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.