Off to the city—
waif,
fragile pretzel
with a Gucci bag
filled with lipsticks for
a change of faces
to be a model
potato chip thin,
ribbon candy in the bull’s eye of
a photographer’s lens,
silk eyes, hollowed cheeks
lashes thick as Japanese fans.
She smiles
after skimping on a breakfast
downtown
when they deep freeze
her youth
on the glossy page of
a fashion ad—
waif,
sugar wafer,
crumbling
in the box,
rattling her borrowed pearls
like round bones.
Christine Anderson is a retired dyslexia specialist who now has the time to hike the Connecticut woods daily with her five dogs, pen and pad in pocket. Her publications include the Comstock, Awakenings, Gyroscope, Octillo and Evening Street Reviews, Slab, Her Words, Glimpse and The Dewdrop, among many others. She won the 2023 American Writers Review Poetry Contest and the 2024 Lee Maes Memorial Award #1 in the National Poetry Day Contest of Massachusetts.