Dancing Barefoot in Mississippi By Beth Gordon

Dancing Barefoot in Mississippi

Icelandic cookbooks occupy our days, seductive icy pages filled with blue clam recipes           
and photos of the woman who saved the island’s goat population from the brink of extinction,
her serious expression softened only by the sweet face of a once doomed animal she cradles      
in her arms as I dance to Led Zeppelin and you turn your attention back to Ireland with thick
mutton gravy and potato-infused pies, this is what I will eat for my next meal, this is the brogue
of my first husband, the way I followed his whiskey-ed voice into motherhood and tried for years
to understand the mysteries of marriage, this is the sound of rain, constant and understood,
here in sticky sunshine that cannot be carried north of the arctic circle, the sound of sobbing
trains, and you tell me that I tell you that I love every song, this is the sound of my wandering
feet, like ghosts of mice, the sound of floors, of days, this is what I’ve been singing all along.

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Beth Gordon is a writer who has been landlocked in St. Louis, Missouri for 16 years but dreams of oceans, daily.
Her work has recently appeared in Into the Void, Quail Bell,Calamus Journal, DecomP, Five:2:One, Barzakh,
​and others. She can be found on Twitter @bethgordonpoet.

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