Why don’t you try to be me and see how
it goes? I’ll take the dull brown hair and the
split floor plan if you’ll go dancing. Are there
other kinds of Ecstasy? I’ll stand in
your back yard at dawn, the sky red above
the distant stacks of the blast furnace, far
enough away that I am in England
or some other empire so long ago
I haven’t been born. In exchange, you’ll be
walking home at day break, holding your high
heels by their back straps, dirty feet on the
concrete, having tossed your stockings into
a dumpster, safe because you know to step
in the middle of the street, no doorways
to fall into. You cannot help yourself
and neither can I on the mornings we
pass each other on the deserted walk.
~
Sandra Kolankiewicz’s poems have appeared widely over the past thirty-five years, starting out with Mississippi Review in 1980 and most recently here, at New World Writing. She teaches developmental English in West Virginia.