To the Girl Posing for Senior Pictures in Front of Used but Nice Office Furniture
By Andrea Krause
It took nearly 40 years to drive by myself on the street, but tonight there I was flaunting both stances—my foam green Subaru, passing by in a practical wave. Did our eyes meet? I was too distracted by lapsed glare, by luster déjà vu. Would you believe I signed those Doc Martens over to thrift, just to buy them again last year? I see what your posture already knows: we requested water but received rock, honed ourselves tattoo sharp, to needle this mug onto the mountain we borrowed. If only we burrowed where we couldn’t be shuffled into four modes, card deck open. We sang, head, shoulders, knees, and toes, until we rhymed our body into additional curves, took our place in the line of ivory pawns, a fawning marionette. My lips press straight, shriveled dredged worms. They’ve crawled across jaundiced beams, lapped up salty quarries. This radioactive jolt, call it double-life, call it half-life. Tonight, we unravel like weather. My feet, pasty blocks of hard white suet, holding cold, refuse to brake.
Andrea Krause lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Penn Review, The Inflectionist Review, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter at @PNWPoetryFog and at andreakrausewrites.com.
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