At the lifestyle center
/Pauletta Hansel
two girls coming out of the underwear store stopped on the sidewalk, in the window behind them a couple of pieces of elasticized lace pulled up over a plastic crotch, and the one girl said to the other, “It was literally a contradiction, I mean it, not even a figurative one, it was a literal contradiction.” And I stop too, by the outdoor adventure store, pretending to look at the hiking boots on the footless, headless mannequin, trying to think up a figurative contradiction. I mean, people pay me money, sometimes, to point out the difference between what’s right there in front of them, or could be, and the unseen river that silvers through our dreams, but for the life of me, figuratively speaking, if that torso had had a smoking gun in its cold, lifeless hand, pointing it at me, I could not have said what it was.
Author’s note: “At the lifestyle center” is a true story. I was (Literally? Figuratively?) stopped in my tracks by the conversation between the young women. I wanted to chase them down and ask what they were talking about, but that would have been rude, and maybe not as much fun as just writing the poem.
Pauletta Hansel’s eighth poetry collection is Friend, epistolary poems written in the early days of the pandemic; her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal and One (Jacar Press), among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018), and is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/.
