Poetry: First Circle

Having Gone the Distance

Without moving themselves, they’ve walked too far,

have come unlaced,

are rotting.

Old leather hangs in rained-on flaps,

drooping,

past a cobbler’s care.

The tongue is spent,

all but worn through,

maybe worked too hard these years.

They’ve had enough of hard miles,

long days,

no tenderness.

Morocco

At the ferry station there,

we must have looked like faeries;

frivolous, flighty, prone to act on whims

and then just return to our abundant homes

while she stayed back in her real world

to make those tiny, tiny shoes

she so desperately wanted us to buy.

We were the magical creatures,

harboring hope and American dollars.

We were the erratic visitors

with a livelihood in our plush pockets,

which we could scrape to give her dinner for a month

and keep for ourselves a pair of little slippers on a string,

little slippers that might fit a faerie

or a premature brown baby

but instead have hung five years from my rearview mirror.

— Featured writer, Muskingum College’s First Circle literary journal, 2006-2007