Contrary to the glamorized accounts we often read
about the lives of single women, Amy Fleury, a native of Kansas, presents
us with a realistic, affirmative picture. Her poem playfully presents her
life as serendipitous, yet she doesn’t shy away from acknowledging
loneliness.
At Twenty-Eight
It seems I get by on more luck than sense, not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood, breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud. I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance. At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude she counts as daylight virtue and muted evenings, the inventory of absence. But this is no sorry spinster story, just the way days string together a life. Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan. Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry. I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights, singing like only a lucky girl can.
“At Twenty-Eight” by Amy Fleury is
reprinted from Beautiful Trouble, Southern Illinois University Press, 2004, by permission of
the author. The poem was originally published in Southern Poetry Review, Volume 41:2,
Fall/Winter 2002. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation,
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
This article appears in May 25-31, 2006.
