[img_assist|nid=10084|title=Eileen Moeller|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=162|height=209]wears a red
mud coat
festooned with
guttural skulls
and rusty mice.
Her daddy made it for her.
Her daddy made it!
Her daddy sewed it with his tiny hands
and frog shuttered needles.
Her hair is a bulky tumor
on the back of her head
that hasn’t been combed in years.
She says it’s
someone following her –
an adversarial eavesdrop
she couldn’t forget about.
Until a policeman gave her,
a policeman handed it right over!
Gives her this beautiful hat out of nowhere,
says it’s made of nail holes.
Where he got it, she don’t know,
She wears it askew
as she dances in yipping green
bramble shoes through
the blindness of June as it turns to night.
Lady Sidewalk leans back on a park bench
and reaches up with both hands
to pull the star blanket down around her.
Her sleep is yellow stained,
knotted like rope, a dream
heaving toward itself, a school a
flounders that won’t be thrown back.
She’ll mutter till dawn,
her words cut flowers bending away
from one of them pretty blue bottles,
that used to hold Milk of Magnesia
Her laughter at this, is hard and cold as
a soot covered snow pile
hanging on after the end of winter.
Lady Sidewalk does not
burn off
the way the dew does.
Days, she haunts our eyes.
Eileen Moeller lives in center city Philadelphia, PA. She has poems in Paterson Literary Review, SugarMule, Ars Medica, and forthcoming in Schuykill Valley Review. Access her blog: And So I Sing at http://eileenmoeller.blogspot.com/