Page 77 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. V #7

In the Waiting Room
A long hallway connecting us to god
knows where, windowless and unremarkable,
but neither desires to begin. Instead
we remove our best shoes, which pinch, and so sit
sockfoot in suits on mismatched furniture
that, while not old and worn, is clearly meant for
another place. One of us finds a mint
in a pocket, the other crumpled tissue,
both left from the other recent time we
couldn’t recognize the wing chairs, the couch
floral and inappropriate like a
mumu at a rainy wake instead of
this church basement before a funeral. We hesitate as if the paint on the
walls were holding us back, our minds full of the unspoken, what we wish to forget.
Kolankiewicz’s poems and stories, widely published and an- thologized, have appeared most recently in London Magazine, New World Writing, BlazeVox, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, Gargoyle, Fifth Wednesday, ArGiLo, Per Contra, and Pif. Her novel Blue Eyes Don’t Cry won the Hackney Award
in 2008. Finishing Line Press published The Way You Will Go in 2014 and released Lost in Transition in March 2017. When I Fell, an e-novel, is available from Web-e-Books and will be coming out in book format.
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