Remember her? Dressed in a chiffon cape for trick-or-treat, her toenails painted
hot pink, and ribbon threaded through her choke-chain. How the building’s children
loved to ride her like a horse. Remember the nightly walk past a bar, a boarded-up shop,
a liquor store, all bordering a sidewalk bordering a gutter spangled in windshield glass
and the litter of cruising johns. Then the cemetery gates we slipped between
to run around headstones and crypts, the only open space those city blocks offered.
Even there, street-light hid the stars, and made the night an old gray box. She was darker
than those nights, a hip-high flow of blackest ink. When a car jumped the curb,
blocked the sidewalk, my wrist flicked – our signal – and she leapt through the driver’s
rolled down window. Not to give him what he sought, no soft mouth on a lonely cock,
but just herself, a bitch with teeth clamping on his forearm. My hips are locked
in that swagger of walking out past midnight with a weapon off the leash.
Michele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear in venues including The Rumpus, Catapult, and Shondaland. Recent poems are published in Poet Lore, North American Review, Stirring, and Baltimore Review.