When I found the blue dress in a sale basket
on the floor at Deluxe Junk for five dollars
I wasn’t looking for anything. But the
wheeling circles of its pattern opened my hands
to the drape of its weight, which was all
that was left of the
heart’s rustle when
the plane left the runway.
It was someone’s idea of a woman dancing,
a memory recited through wars.
It paid homage to underwear beneath the turning
wave flared out from hips, the colour of
a field of lupins passed at high speed.
What a fighter pilot remembers of love.
How it hung made sense of my throat,
and taught what breasts can accomplish,
how it swung the skirt into summer, a
carnival with the younger I
at the center. It was cut with hunger.
It was stitched with the trailing hurt
of a saxophone note stretched long and
almost breaking.
in a wood-cut pattern like an ink sketch,
in the New Yorker of champagne bubbles
or how cartoons represent thought.
But it’s not about thought, the colour
of delphinium crossed with
iris, a dress made from blue sky and jizz,
the skirt’s wide wheel, turning
The way it moves the body in space.
The dress was made to spin. It was arched
and older than I knew what I was getting into.
I wore it for years before you saw the design
it had on me and swore then
that dress started everything
I turned around in, brazen in,
the lifted skirt, forget-me-not, the way
you held the zipper at the waist and undid me
the dress spread out beneath us with its bluesy
pattern of cornflowers tossed
at a wedding, or wild flowers thrown
into an open grave.
Third Place (tied)
Hart House Poetry Contest