Stick Dance
I’m caked in history, upside down on your street,
my silhouette cutting singers in black and white,
dizzy between the trees, amassing description.
I come clean, blow a path through talcum powder
and cheap hotel bars of soap, use chicken bones
to lure you, but it isn’t high school and
you are provoked into fury. I’m afraid it won’t be
played out when my tap shoes confront your
steel-capped boots in the elbows of corridors.
We roll in coffee grains, smelling so good
I decide to repeat this game with subsequent lovers,
to scatter coffee in all of my rooms.
I smear myself in vaseline and am arrested
when I use you without permission
in my stick dance, my stroll dance.
Karen Little‘s poems and short stories have recently been published in over forty magazines and anthologies, including Best of Manchester Poets, Southern Pacific Review, and Under the Radar magazine. Her novella Filled with Ghosts was published in December 2015 and is available on Amazon.