Souvenirs

How

could you

get rid of them–the dance shoes

you enhabited? More and more broken

week after week, but take

a closer look at the bottom of the right

shoe with stitching at the seam

unraveling with each pirouette, loose threads

mimicking choreography with frames on each side

hugging your arches, the scuff

on the heel–a souvenir when the bruises

fade, a worn-down toe, as if sanded with a nail

file, not a twin but a neighbor you secretly

gifted more, the surface, decorated

in black dirt clouds, showing where bone came

closest to meeting the floor

below, but you’d rather them than empty

skies.

Ariya Bandy is a writer of poetry and fiction. Her work appears in The Creative Zine and elsewhere.