Tara Mae Schultz is a second year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Memphis. She is also the senior poetry editor for the award-winning literary journal, The Pinch.
She has work published or forthcoming in Touchstone Literary Journal, The Los Angeles Review, Di Mezzo Il Mare, and The Southern Women’s Review.
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The Red Shoes
My vagina
ungraphs,
slithers away.
I imagine she dons
red dancing shoes,
dances in whip winds
on far-off mountains,
mounts horses,
runs madcap
away from the sun’s ascension.
Sometimes my neighbors
find her, early morning,
belly-up,
bloated,
hoarse.
They tell me,
We saw her.
She must have had quite a ball.
You ever know where she goes?
I smile,
thinly,
No.
At least she returns though.
Yes, she does.
Re-graphing herself,
she puts on a game face
for a day in the life of a married woman:
I rise,
pat myself with body cream,
watch the children
eat their toast and eggs.
I watch the dust rise in a field
next to the carpool lane
and think about deserts,
droughts,
the dust bowl.
I dust the bookshelf,
finger my mother’s old thesaurus.
In the evening,
Earl kisses my nape.
I lie back and count
the turns of the ceiling fan,
listen to the calendar pages
rustle with each revolution.
When I drift off to sleep,
I wonder idly
who knows what
things she’s seen
and why
I’ve never followed her.