Where Fashion Sits (poem)

Where Fashion Sits

Are you the larval worm

in the larder

Every feathered pillow has this unseen delver

You feel yourself layered in tissue paper

Your rat’s race a peristaltic ripple of waxy flesh

Your crackling head a pin

The glue has brittled in the way of yellowed cellophane

The leather soles peel and the toes point east

Where fashion sits

Glad rags with sleeves in prayerful pose

Murmur and drone, the noise of fingernails playing

Over a plastic comb

You may grow into this waiting life

You may pop from a shell casing and sprout wings

The tunnel may end in a coruscating light

You bore ahead jawing mechanistically

Your dreams are also crinolined

Greened with mold and raveled through

All that might be you had you lived to

wear these things

Is your skull embedded with the gravel of the road

Peppered with the commentator’s voice on the

endless screen

Are you an angel attenuated losing plumage

In the pitiless rush of the jet stream

Open your eyes…

They wait there for the runner

Your legs jerk at the knees

And your face drains of color

Where Fashion Sits

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Male and Female

(2015, Stephanie Foster)