Some women master mirrors
in gas stations and motel rooms,
painting smiles to charm the night.
They learn to get by
when July deepens on fastbreath
��������or uncertain hands.

They count tips in Denny's,
lying themselves into poetry,
blending into the pavement
of pigeon shit gray---
��������elegy clinging to pores
��������like perspiration.

The ash-tray girls, their bodies:
tree stumps in mud, fashioned
in the light of sour milk.

They buy french sleepers to weep in,
whisper abandonment and carry
love, light like a wafer
��������on the tongue.

They pick up pennies, study them
for signs of age, see months
become smoke in still rooms along
��������the back streets of Eden.

Ladies, hardened to glass,
they lose children in supermarkets,
sink into the cold
as minutes become urgent
and everything is counted,
like meter money,
��������like days that pass.



�2006 by Cherilyn Ferroggiaro
previously published in Underground Voices Magazine