Your feet

When I look at you, I don’t look at your face which is old as your feet are young but at your toenails which glimmer like hidden diamonds between the thinning copper of nailpolish smears.


An invisible carpet of air conspires with your semi-heeled shoes to save you from the waddling gait of short women. You float instead, an enchanted mermaid on a quest ashore, hover footlessly weightlessly soundlessly over us all. I like to see you hoist yourself onto a chair as if it were a wall, your dangling feet a good six inches above ground. The skin of your heels are pink and whole yet as it will be for feet that will be forever foreigner on any soil. I wonder if the pain of unjourneyed miles finds their way to your legs at night, if you’ll always deny the earth a taste of your feet, content to watch ships come and go, banners flutter and fall, heralds go up in song and return in silence.

My own feet have been carved with knife-cuts of too many miles, soils not of my choosing breathe within these holes. Braving thistle and thawed ground, bleeding over every stone in creation, once again would I stake the yet unehealed wounds of my feet in search of flowers to lay at yours.