Distraction, Furious and Brief
Editor’s Note: This poem by Gillian Wegener is being presented as part of our special focus on poetry during #PoetryMonth in April. Please read our introduction to the series.
Poem by Gillian Wegener. From This Sweet Haphazard, published by Sixteen Rivers Press
The Baptist church serves dinner at four, and the line
starts early, snakes around the shady side of the building.
Afternoon moves as slowly as summer heat lifts,
which is to say, it almost doesn’t.
Bits of lives sink into the sidewalks.
Someone fixes a wheel on his cart of possessions.
Someone swigs something and passes it to his right.
And a woman in a sundress, colors of spring, crosses the street,
head up, chin out, confident the whole crowd’s watching,
and some of them are as she stops, mid-crosswalk, hoisting her skirt high,
shaking her nakedness up and down, swinging her hips, her flesh
a mass of pink and bruise, head back, baring her teeth at the sky.
She turns and hip-bumps a furious circle dance
even as the light turns green, even as there are catcalls
and honking, even as some in the supper line look away
and some in the line shrug, and some keep watching
as she runs the rest of the way across the street, skirt up-up-up,
and the traffic moves on, and it’s ten ‘til, still hot and
the long day’s just the same as always.
Copyright © 2017 by Gillian Wegener, used with permission.
Foreword Reviews
