Modest but insistent, diminutive
but intermittently loud— you dislike
anything that chafes against your
contours, dares to wrap a narrow
box of leather around the front
of the foot. When pressed too long
throughout the day, you flush red
alarms that travel through all
the body's highways. Flip-flops
or open-toe cut-out sandals are
probably best as footwear, though
they might be conspicuous in a crowd
of the mostly slender and well-heeled.
Oh but you are a knob of marble splayed
with veins, quarried from those distant
hills where peasants trek the muddy trails
unshod. A bead, carved from the bones of granary
gods crouched near house posts and wire coops
where roosters crow, flash their black and
orange feathers and brandish their spurs.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
