The Blue Dress
By Alexis Orgera
Woke up thinking she's in her dotage.
I’d been dreaming about the blue couch
but was the couch on its final legs sequestered to a living-
room with the untuned piano?
A woman can only explain her longing
for a blue couch by a trip to a psychic:
You were a whore the psychic says over tea and Oreos
In your last life you were a whore and a handsome john saved you
from a burning building—
You were wearing a blue dress.
So a woman buys a blue couch one sunny Sunday.
Light angling through jack pines and down again
through vertical strips of blind
into my childhood living room dangling
strange couchlike shadows around my arms.
The couch slogged
across the Atlantic on the heels of its dark claw-feet.
Maybe it was going home and taking me with it.
Was I in my dotage?
The couch stared down the eye of a hurricane.
The couch carried my goose egg across the wild.
