I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

...He questioned softly why I failed?
'For beauty,' I replied.
'And I for truth,-the two are one;
We brethren are,' he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.


Emily Dickinson

"if seeing is believing / I believe we have lost our eyes"

lindsey.

black-stockinged feet fall
off the edge of a bed reflected
in the mirror that lines
one wall

thoughts
are redundant, since
the time I turned fourteen,
I haven't stopped
once

earlier
I practiced pirouettes and
chaine turns without enough
room

I imagined
stuffing everything inside the
old, clumsy suitcase:
a sweater, a hundred dollar bill,
and leaving in
the night

I don't know anything, but
things aren't

always propelled by other things.



_____
copyright Miss Erin McIntosh, 2011
please do not reprint without permission

When my great grandmother was a young girl, she danced once with a boy and fell in love with him. Falling in love was easier back then, she tells me now. He took her the next weekend to get sundaes and on Tuesday they went rowing out at the lake near her mother's old farmhouse. When they were married he was nervous and she was calm. On their first anniversary, he gave her a necklace of brown pearls and a velvet bow, and she gave him their first child, a boy.

She says now that I don't know enough about falling in love because once people try and explain it to you it's a lost cause. People talk too much in my generation, she says. Once you think there can be an explanation and rules about what age you ought to be and where you ought to meet and what he ought to say when he takes you to meet his folks is all irrelevant. She waves her hand mildly in the air to make her point.

Did you ever wonder if he was your soulmate, I mean? - this is what I try to ask her. She peers at me like I am younger than she'd remembered. He asked me to dance, she persists. And then he called, and we - and she's begun the story over again, pausing for emphasis at her favorite parts.

emily.

twenty from my twentieth