Night after night,
I hear my libido sneak out the door
without me.
Hips swaying, lips pursed—
tonight, she left
wearing those skintight leather pants
I’d hidden in the back of the closet
in hopes they would fit me again
someday.
She’s a wild one
and slippery too.
While I lie in bed wide awake, lusting
after nothing more
than a good night’s sleep,
that shameless hussy’s out there somewhere—
gyrating her butt off,
clubbing the night away.
I don’t want a red dress, anymore.
I don’t want anything flimsy and cheap, anymore.
I want some loose and comfortable pants that no one
would dream of tearing off me. And a shirt
that covers my arm wings and liver-spotted back
and my sagging breasts. But if you must know,
what I really want is to be able to remain upright
and walk on my own two feet until I die. I want to walk
through the rooms of my own house, onto my back patio
where the cardinals make their nest and the sunflowers
return every spring. I don’t want anyone to have to push me
in a wheelchair down the aisles of the grocery store
or help me onto a walker when I have to pee.
I want my eyes to hold out so I can gobble up words
and ideas, maybe a newspaper—if they still exist,
and the books on my shelf I haven’t read yet, some
good mysteries, and yes, all those back issues
of the New Yorker with those impressive sounding
incomprehensible poems that I’m determined
to finally understand. I don’t want to pretend
I’m the only woman on earth. I will need people—
both men and women to talk with if my friends
leave before me. I don’t want my final years to confirm
your worst fears about isolation and aging. I want
to keep caring about the world, my family, my friends
and what they want, too. And I mean it, Kim—
if you want that damned red dress and I can
help you get it—I will. But I want to tell you
that there’s a time when desire turns from sex
to a longing for something I can’t quite name.
I hope I find it before I have to put this body
back on the unknown hanger it was borrowed from
to carry me through this world of birth-cries and love-cries
and loss-cries, too. In the meantime, I will wear this body
like you wear your red dress, thanking these bones, this skin.
It’ll be the godblessed body they cremate me in.
A native Chicagoan, Sandra Szelag fell in love with the Sonoran desert and moved
to Tucson in 1977 where she has worked as a Unitarian Universalist minister and
a Pastoral Counselor for the last thirty-six years. She currently serves as a docent
at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Since reigniting her lifelong passion
for poetry in 2006, her poems have received awards from the Arizona Poetry Society
and SandScript Literary Magazine, and have appeared in Spiral Orb
and Spilled, an anthology by the Dry River Poets.