Why I Have Kept My Mother's Red High Heels
Why I Have Kept My Mother's Red High Heels Which Are Too Small for Me and Did Not Fit Her Either
by Antonia Clark
Because they were her dress-up shoes
and she never once
had an occasion to wear them
and because she let me sit
on the floor of her closet
and walk them with my hands
and because they were to go
with the black lace mantilla, folded
in tissue in her top bureau drawer
because she never learned
to speak Spanish,
and because she speaks now
by laying her hand on my arm
because, though they might
have fit her once — on the day
she bought them when she still
dreamed of dancing —
they were too tight forever after
because one day, at twilight,
we walked to the river,
where I was forbidden to go alone
and each of us made a wish
and tossed a stone
and though it would have been
bad luck to speak wishes aloud
I knew she wished
she could give me the moon
that hung somewhere above us
hidden by a smudge
of charcoal cloud.
ANTONIA CLARK works for a medical software company in Burlington, Vermont. She has taught college-level creative writing and is currently co-administrator of an online poetry forum, The Waters. Her poems have recently appeared in kaleidowhirl, Light Quarterly, Lily, Loch Raven Review, Lucid Rhythms, Rattle, Stirring, and elsewhere.