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dancing girl press, 2013
$7.00 |
Sacha Siskonen’s poetry has recently appeared in Crab Orchard Review. Her fiction is forthcoming from or has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Spork, Alice Blue Review, Word Riot, The Mississippi Review online (now Blip Magazine) and elsewhere. She blogs at The Saskatchewan Review http://saskatchewanreview.wordpress.com/ .
Dinner Party
I apply lipstick in the mirror, pomegranate red. My hair waved and set like Betty Draper. I use an electric can opener. A-line skirt, an old fashioned, but I’m not waiting for Don. Not barefoot. Not dependant. How far we have come. Hors d'oeuvres circle each other like dogs on the plate. Split open a peach. Pit made of glass. Slit open a finger uncorking red wine. Blood and a Band-Aid. Bright orange cantaloupe. Sliced, I don’t have a baller. Forgot the toothpicks, forgot the Coke, forgot to bake a Bundt cake. How far have we come? I think of my mother who used to throw parties, but always let my father cook. Law School dropout, she went gray at thirty, never looked back. I think of my grandmother with her beehive, always careful not to roll over in her sleep. How much further? I don’t want to have daughters with long hair and scratchy skirts or skinned knees and sunny dispositions or shoulder pads and hair extensions or law degrees and jogging strollers or business lunches and nail appointments or salad forks and garter belts or Eleanor Roosevelt’s eyes.
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