The Woman at the Concert Who Twirled

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She arrived barefoot

Pulled by the

Magnet of music

Her shoes

Abandoned

Like glass slippers

Her toddler orbiting her

Celestial body

Like a baby astronaut

Around the hemisphere of her skirt

She twirls

Like 

Gene Kelly’s umbrella

In Singing in the Rain

As she performs 

the spontaneous,

Arm swaying

wild-child

choreography

of motherhood

Leaving in her car

The exhausted Happy Meal 

The weaponized heart

The inheritance of disappointments

The provocation of bills

The asterisks 

The annotations

The affirmations

The endless excuses and

The resistance to indisputable facts

Which is why she is here

On leave from the Crusades

With its sanguinary battlefield 

of computers

And coworkers

And a marriage 

That has lost its romance

Like the keys that she can never find

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