INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Bilall Maliqi
Duane Locke
Eddie Awusi
Silvia Scheibli
Amit Parmessur
Lyn Lifshin
Juan Hongi
Shutta Crum
Peycho Kanev
Fahredin Shehu
Lana Bella
Laszlo Slomovits
Abdulrahman M Abu- yaman
Elisavietta Ritchie
Michelle Bailat-Jones
Keith Moul
Aneek Chatterjee
Tom Evans
Robert Nisbet
Paul B. Roth
Alex Ferde
Alan Britt
Ali Znaidi
Running Cub
John Grey
Jennifer Burd
Fred Wolven
Helen Gyigya
Ann Arbor Review
is an independent
International Journal & ezine
Copyright (c) 2018
Francis Ferde
All rights revert back to each poet.
--editor / Southeastern Florida
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AAR history note: in print 1967 - 1980. Irregular publications 1980 - 2004. As ezine 2004 - present. Most of 51 years all together....
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staff:
Francis Ferde
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
Submissions via e-mail:
LOST AND FOUND SHOES
The closest parking space is a couple of
blocks away.
There never is any parking downtown.
I get out and opened the car door for her.
She does a quarter turn in her seat
and slides her slim ankles out the door.
Black straps no wider than fettuccini
hold her latest fashion acquisition on narrow feet.
My date has a thing for shoes; a plethora of
which clog her closets.
Whenever we go out, she obsessively notices
what shoes other women are wearing.
We are walking toward the theater district
when we come upon
a woman’s high-heel shoe on the sidewalk.
Its companion lies in the grass a few feet away.
She stops. I sense her reluctance to pass the
orphaned footwear.
She picks up the shoe from the concrete and looks it over.
It’s very dressy.
A subtle sadness comes over her. To her mind,
Shakespeare couldn’t have devised a more lamentable tragedy
than this beautiful pair of shoes should be lost or abandoned.
She speculates that the woman may have been
taken—plucked right out of her shoes.
That seems unlikely to me, and I say so.
Abducted by whom—aliens in flying saucers?
She pushes me away, annoyed.
I pick up the second shoe and postulate a
more reasonable scenario:
the woman had worn walking shoes and carried her high heels
in her bag like New Yorkers do. Perhaps they’d fallen out.
My date isn’t convinced. She wants us to take
the shoes to...
I don’t know where,
some lost and found for sidewalks?
some random nightclub in the city?
I pry the first shoe from her hand and place
it and its mate on the walk,
reasoning that if the person who lost them comes back,
we should leave them where they can be easily found.
Some say a man is a creature of reason, and
woman an emotional soul,
never has that been more evident than when
I make her leave a pair of lost shoes behind.
OLD ORDER
Reading aloud about convent life
she left decades earlier,
a former nun stands at the podium.
Gray hair cascades over her shoulders
like an old style habit.
Her clothing, black and white,
serves as a subconscious remainder
of clothes she’d worn fifteen years or longer.
She asks our permission to read more.
Given the nod, she continues
with descriptive passages about
women’s voices ringing in the sacred space
of a marble choir loft,
and concludes with: “women are givers of life,
arms encircling a well reflecting stars and moon,
symbols of the universe.”
Richard Gartee, Gainsville, Florida