Find a brown shoelace with a knot. Glide
your fingers over its bulbous tip. Tease
and grunt the woven strands apart, lace
nylon slick, gooseberry slick, spit slick
so that it twists against your index.
Curse the old shoe, dried-up leather
in the bottom of the cedar closet. Swear
at ten matching pairs of tan wing tips
polished stiff, outdated as glass ashtrays,
traded decades ago for cloth tennis shoes
spongy enough to pad the weight pacing
antique sales, shopping shooting targets.
Laugh if you like, this is a war of attrition.
Who knows why we fight it, our armpits
slick with stink, musky as yoked oxen.
Our brows sour with beads, glimmer,
furrow with the furious work of untying
objects from their owner, casting off
the dead weight of their uselessness
like clipped nails. Come to think of it,
all life flakes like skin, shrivels, falls
like ash into no grave, into the non-box,
into the lack of a coffin. Stop to think—
all our shoes will become this worthless
when the feet they fit have ceased to exist.
Hang on a sec. Go back. Focus. Find
a shoelace tight with knot. Touch it, soft.
LuLu Johnson turned to Art History the day they dissected a live rat in her Pre-Med Biology class. She went on to earn an MFA in Poetry at Georgia State where she studied with David Bottoms. LuLu’s poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Atlanta Review, The Branches Journal, and others. LuLu writes novels about art and myth, essays about horses and men, and poems about family. Her weekly Substack, All Points South, chronicles her writing journey. Subscribe for free at: https://lu2johnson.substack.com/