Photograph by Tom McKinnell
Narrow
I place both my feet
into
one of your shoes
the act surprisingly intimate,
shy, like the first time
you walked up to me intending
to kiss, and our hands
found each other first. I lace it up loosely.
We both chuckle. I do not stand up. I have
already fallen enough;
gently, as your lips on my neck –
gently, as a shoelace comes loose.
Jennifer A. McGowan’s latest pamphlet, Still Lives with Apocalypse, won the Prole Pamphlet Competition. She’s a professional calligrapher and illuminator, is disabled, and prefers the fifteenth century to the twenty-first.