where other people lived, acquires pillowcases
where other faces drooled, slurps broth off thrift store spoons
formerly cradled in the dark caverns of strangers’ mouths.
She wears embroidered dresses with yellowed armpits,
and her repeatedly broken shoe laces are held together by fraying knots.
A line cook she met said I’m going to call you Nomad
when she told him her name was Lady.
It’s fitting. Lady doesn’t have a home.
She roams from city to city, always renting
apartments with eggshell walls, which she paints
yellow rain coat,
ice cube silver, mudslide.
Despite what’s written in the lease, she never returns
the walls to their original white.
She imagines new tenants slicing celery, slicing jicama,
or black olives dumped from a tin can
while surrounded by the same colors that surrounded her
when she did her slicing.
Bridget Bell is an Ohio-born writer living in NYC, and she holds her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been published in the New Ohio Review, The Chaffey Review, Folio and SUB-LIT, among other publications. She works as a bartender in Manhattan’s financial district, and also as an assistant editor at FourWay Books.
[ LINK: decomP Magazine ]
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