Getting a Shine at Bradley International Airport

By Angela Just

I check the posted prices near my gate, wonder if there’s time 
for a shoeshine, maybe “The Basic” at six dollars, fifty cents. 
You need a shine, says the woman running the booth. And she’s
not asking. Yes, I think: a shine, a polish, a reboot. Her words 
hit me like my friend’s this morning: You have a right to your life, 
she’d said, and now I want this shine like my life depends on it. 
The stand rises like a shrine where anyone can sit as Buddha, 
observe in silence the rivers of passing feet. The woman concedes
she likes my shoes, but scowls when my foot slips off the stirrup. 
Relax, she says, pulling me back in line for the final brush. 
She buffs each shoe to a luster, coaxes light from the leather. 
Give care to these, she says, they’ll last forever. 

The final slaps of rag on shoe clap like a call to arms.
My body rattles with the work it takes for shining.

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Angela Just is the author of Everything I Own, a micro-chapbook published by Porkbelly Press. Her poems have appeared in Sweet: A Literary Confection, Haunted Waters Press, Flyway, MAKE, After Hours, and others. A Chicago writer, she is a long-time member of Egg Money Poets, a small collective of writers who support each other’s work and writing lives. Her chapbook manuscript, The Last Thing I Would Smell, is beginning to make the rounds.

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