Mid Rise Dark Wash Ripped Skinny
Mid Rise Dark Wash Ripped Skinny
I wrestle my way into a pair of jeans, and the ghost inside slips out. She’s younger by a few years, thinner by a few pounds, lean and strong and sure she knows. She doesn’t know, can’t know how it is that I’m more grateful for this body now than I was for that body then. I am slower. I am softer. I stop to catch my breath. My ghost watches me, wondering, her face gray confusion. I pull the button into place and look back with love.
Photo by Roberto Sorin on Unsplash
The Prompt
This poem poured out of me by surprise when I put on a pair of jeans that I don’t think I’ve worn since my pre-Covid days. My closet is full of memories. Race t-shirts, clothes made or gifted by people I love, dresses worn only for special occasions, things that no longer fit. Probably, it’s time for a donation run to Good Will, but the lovely thing about my failure at minimalism is that my closet is packed full of possible poems.
For today’s prompt, take some time to rummage through your own collection of clothing. Is there something you forgot you own? Something you reach for almost every day? Something too tattered to wear but too beloved to throw out? Something that reminds you of somebody or some time or some place? If you scan back through the years, is there an item of clothing you miss and wish you could have again? Something ridiculously comfortable or newly back in style or rich with memories? What poem might be waiting for you, hidden inside a pocket or stitched into a seam?
I’m excited to read what you share!
Cardigans and cardigans
Before I knew about the band, almost before Taylor Swift was born
I was living in and loving everything in cardigans
first embroidered with sweet flowers and tiny buttons
then longer and looser as my body waxed and waned
and fashions always changed. Never a pull-over sweater.
.
Please don’t go over my head. Please fold around me.
Please hold me but don’t contain me, please keep me warm
while letting the air move against me, billowing backwards
like a cape or a cloak, a super-hero Regency-era woman
a woman who has found her comfort clothing, and takes comfort in it.
I am in kindergarten,
crouched behind the couch
minutes before school bus pickup.
It is Dress Day, an invention
of my mother’s
meant to deflect
my advancing tomboy.
I am wearing my favorite shirt:
white with green and orange stripes,
kind of a Bert and Ernie aesthetic.
I am clutching my worst nightmare:
a pink wad of tucks and frills,
what I am supposed to be.
.
I don’t recall who won that skirmish
but my little resistance
still thrills me.
If I’m honest I was hiding in the open,
wanting her to see.
Dress Day died young.