Shame Coat
She bought it second-hand in San Francisco, at a Crossroads.
There it hung, slouched dimly at the end of the rack, not even
rubbing shoulders with the others. The rest all clustered near
the moto-jacket anyway (scuffed, riveted real leather) and the
rainbow bolero (frizz explosion, technicolor exclamation points).
Others had moved past its hunching shape: oversized and army green,
hanging limp, a patient almost etherized (even its asterisk could nearly be
erased). She wore it
like an unkempt nest,
a spume of smoke, a dirty seagull picking through discarded bins,
a tented hand around a warning that she hadn’t heard the first time
underneath the pounding bass. In it, she was a gaze averted. That coat
was one more pen run out of ink, discarded on the verge, where weeds
kept growing without water. It was everything she wanted: a shield
of untrimmed juniper, a grove of shadows, a place to hedge the bets
she’d lost, to hide from hands that kept on reaching in to finger
all her instincts, from voices saying
if you hadn’t been so gullible.
Within it, no one could outline or trace the map of her, could undulate
her coastline. Wrapped, no one could imply her thighs were far too
close a call to crotch. The coat miraged her flight through daylight, hid
her too-late shape of unreverberated no. It held her hollow bones,
pushed the prod of one more dusk away, its stale breath, its smudge
unemptied as an ashtray on horizon. When night lurched down through fog,
it cushioned every landing, a cowl around her throat, a cave that she
could carry.
Years later, she found her old coat crumpled in the closet,
gathered it but didn’t put it on. Just lifted it, curled
inside her arms a moment, exhaled slow, as if
somehow within its folds she still sensed
the whirred bird heartbeat
tremoring its breast.
Alison Hurwitz has been featured in Rust and Moth, River Heron Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Shore, and Thimble, among others. Her work is forthcoming in Carmina Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, The South Dakota Review, and Black Fox Review. Alison hosts Well-Versed Words, a monthly online poetry reading. alisonhurwitz.com