First dress

“Summer, when you haven’t had it, is like a revenge”
Angel Nafis

This morning, eight o’clock doesn’t feel like rockslide.
Light is lemon lime through your eyelids.
Warmth butters your joints. Each limb
swings like wind chime. In the garden
columbine and narcissus kazoo your name.
This is the promise the Earth keeps : Why die ?

The dress is the color of a prescription bottle.
But pancakes, not painkillers, are your fill. You dance
through the kitchen without underwear —
won’t muffle the flock between your legs.
You’re an amber, breezing banner of your own
right to be alive ; an upside down
tiger lily. You walk proud and crooked
as a heron for surviving another ice harvest.

Liv Mammone et Virginie Rochetti

Liv Mammone is an editor and poet from Long Island. As part of Union Square Slam, she is the first visibly disabled woman to compete on a New York national slam team. She is an editor with Game Over Books.