Reposting in public an old poem.  Loosely inspired by the nursery rhyme about the old woman in a shoe.

Written in 2003, originally published in Chizine.

Five Years in A Shoe

Remember it was the witch.
Darkling plain; the profaned stones
you stood on as your roving
fingers scrabbled at the tomb
and the inscription and then
the green glass eye. Not quite a
screech but shrill enough to stab
through your eardrum and out the
other and you shrank into
the debris of the grave in
gratitude—o spell,
o new churned darkness.

Remember that it was stormy. You
never saw whether it had buckles;
only that your sword spun away and
vanished just like you; the unblinking
eye grew sharper and the stitched
brown sides shot up all around
like a black pit growing to the
rhythm of curse-word cacophony—
phrases that expand as you diminish
into dampness and fungal rot.

But now it is the shoe. The heel
worn thin, improperly cobbled
and the leather flap, past which
chill dawn air flows in, three times
a day when the weather changes. See
your wife floating before you
like a summer gown. Last night she
spoke into your ears and said you
had been gone so long women no longer
wore dresses. You started and
tried to climb to freedom;
scaled the walls, but they
turned into gelatinous animal fibres—
“Not a moment less!” she decreed.
For your hours are numbered.

This morning you woke up and realised
the shoe is an illusion. It lives
in your head, or maybe not; the smell
of mouldy ex-sweat curls around your
nostrils.

Make no mistake: Five years
passes like seconds, suspended;
hanging in time like curses
on tiptoe.