"Inside Smile" by Tara Kipnees
Sometimes, a room blooms like a black
flower, even in morning, and my ears
burn with the memory of hollow notes.
Sometimes, music fills me with a longing
I balance carefully
like a sphere of paper-thin glass on my head
while I’m walking down the street and it feels
like I’m in a really low-budget circus
and the audience keeps throwing peace signs
like darts to nowhere.
Sometimes, when night is deep,
I remember how red leather my heart is,
that there’s a piano I can’t play anymore
but the notes I imagine sound new
as blades of grass between my toes,
and there’s champagne melting
on my tongue, and these legs of mine
which never lied.
Tara Kipnees' work has appeared in Pigeon Pages, Sugar House Review, Moon City Review, decomP magazinE, Salon, and Serving House Literary Journal. In 2016, her flash fiction was nominated for Queen’s Ferry Press Best of Small Fictions. Tara lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children. Since writing her first poem at seven (dedicated to the wild geese of Tamaques Park), finding the right words still gives her the butterflies.
