ORTHOPEDIC SHOES
Protectively clutching a half-empty bottle
of Labatt Blue, she crosses her backyard to mine
without falling down. She says she watched
the Lawrence Welk tap dancers all afternoon,
but now she needs some air.
Keeping her balance by leaning on the fence,
she wants me to give her a ride
to the 7-Eleven for some dog biscuits
and a loaf of bread.
She hasn’t been well lately and her cupboards
are inexplicably bare. Just look at her dog,
she continues. When she calculates
his age in human years
he’s approaching seventy-five,
counting his stay at the pound.
He’s overdue for a bath and doesn’t get enough
exercise, her arthritic basset hound flinching
when my neighbor raises her voice.
Indignant and nearly shouting, she complains
about the way she has been treated.
The tabloids she reads confirm her suspicions,
how the government has been suppressing
inventions that promise an infinite
supply of energy and can be constructed
with parts you can buy at your
local hardware store.
It’s all a conspiracy to stop people
from waking up, and if I refuse to take her
on a liquor-run I am a waste of time—
mowing my lawn while our neighborhood
is going down the tubes, and it’s not safe
to walk anywhere alone after dark.
She tells me that her shoes feel like blocks
of wood. They pinch when she
stands in them too long,
though their label called them orthopedic.
They came with a page of easy exercises,
which she could try
without ever leaving her home, and they carried
a seal of excellence that guaranteed
her satisfaction, within reasonable limits,
for the life of the shoe.
Michael David Jewell is a poet, painter, and novelist living in Calais, Vermont. Two of his chapbooks were published by Wood Thrush Books, and his individual poems have appeared in journals such as Mizna, The Shanghai Literary Review, Negative Capability Press, Roanoke Review, and The Manhattanville Review. Or more recently in Channel and Slippery Elm.
