It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
I used to hip-check the jukebox when I passed it if I didn’t like the song playing; the music would veer and skip where my curve met the rounded corner of neon and metal. I took out Peggy Lee’s guttural whine this way every month until they finally stopped replacing it. I looked good in my stain-hiding brown waitress uniform, all camber and coil, shined up with kitchen heat and magnetic. Who wants to be reminded magic is illusory when the dove is still flying out of the hat with such disarming reliability? I wanted to dance because dancing made a flame lick at the edges of everything. Here was the secret to living: what is dull can be polished to a hot glow with the right friction. What is lost can be added to the heart’s altar. Peggy Lee wailed her faith in disappointment but she was wrong: even the fryer grease which hung in the air and followed me from work to the bar after once made a hungry boy tell me I smelled miraculous.
Rebecca Aronson is the author of Anchor, forthcoming from Orison Books in October, 2022; Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize and winner of the 2019 Margaret Randall Book Award from the Albuquerque Museum Foundation; and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize (2007). She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. Her website is rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com.
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