by Janet Reed

To:  David

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange!
Ovid, Metamorphoses

Once in love with metamorphosis as eager
to reinvent myself as Daphne’s lunge
from limb to laurel tree, I centered myself

in dead language, ancient history, big band jazz,
as far from I seen, Jesus, and Johnny Cash
as I could go until I met a boy jealous of Ovid—

more Michael Jackson than Lena Horne. He said
he loved how I loved him. Asked me to leave
my vintage dresses and yellowed translations

to disco the nights away with the Bee Gees
and him—our dance enhanced by Tom Collins,
our days sustained with laughs and big dreams.

I learned too late how fast a dance spins down,
that songs on repeat lose their sound,
that love does not ask love to lose itself.

Before the last disco ball left town, my palms
bore vermillion stains marking lines of my lost
future.  Penitent, I dipped my fingers in ink

and rolled them over a parchment of skin
I soon recognized as my own—made mudstones
of words I thought lost in the glitter ball fever

of my past, keepers of a heart long buried, testament
to the laurels left behind, strophes of my ode
to “Stayin’ Alive” stuttering I’ll live to see another day.

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Janet Reed is a 2017 and 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sow’s Ear Review, The Nassau Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and others. She began writing knock-off Nancy Drew stories on wide-lined notebook paper at age 11 and now teaches writing and literature for Crowder College in Missouri. She is a 2018-19 guest editor at I-70 Review and author of the chapbook Blue Exhaust (Finishing Line Press 2019).