Perfectly Good Shoes


It started with a pair of desert boots I begged for seventh-grade Christmas
that arrived weeks after everyone stopped wearing them.  I was spoiled.
A billion people in China were desert-bootless – I didn't care.  My mother 
started wearing them around the house, then for short trips to town.
 
Soon she added my discarded denim bell bottoms with red pinstripes, 
my leather belt with the dancing bears buckle.  My teen years were haunted 
by mismatched versions of my old selves – my mother's pale, smiling face 
perched on top.  Even after I moved out, married, had kids, I never knew 
 
what mishmash of my old tie-dyed T-shirts, disco shoes, madras shorts 
or wide-collared floral shirts would show up at Christmas or Fourth of July 
along with news of successful classmates and clipped obits of neighbors 
I never knew I'd known.  When she died, I emptied her closets 
 
and gave it all to a Greek church across town.  But on cold mornings 
I see the frayed arm of my Christmas sweater toss the paper on my lawn. 
At night my tattered ninja pants take my movie ticket and tear it in half. 
And my laced-together desert boots dangle from a wire downtown.

First published in SNReview