Ordinary Things

(Second Place winner in the Winterfest 2005 Poetry Contest, Grand Haven, MI)


She peels off her day, slip, brassiere, panties, layers nurtured for an audience.
At the open window she strips off nylons, the cross at her neck, flings hairpins
onto her bureau then leans naked over the sill, and stares down into the city.
In its bat blackness and stark white lights, blinking, she balls up her stockings
and takes aim.

Below, a man snatches a sheer-dangled leg, rips the ghost
of her foot as it catches on the dumpster's open gap.
He sniffs the remnants of her ordinary day; ankles crossed
under a desk, imagined feet clacking
on pavement as she runs. She wears a pink scarf flared
at the throat as she tries to make the bus, her heel slipping
in and out of her toe.

This man has stumbled across the history of a woman's foot scribbled to the quickened draw of his lip, upward to nostril.

His pulse quickens as she turns out the light.