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Jennifer A. McGowan: a poem

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.

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