Benjamin Russell

Dzvinia Orlowsky

Stars

At a poetry reading the woman to my right
is wearing capri pants, brandishing
her ankles above her sneakers.
In the middle of a poem she tells me
she likes to wash dishes and elbows
me in the arm. I squint at her smile,
thinking about what my father once told me:
you can tell a lot about a woman by her ankles.
But he never told what to look for, so I glance at hers:
skin dry from the winter air, a tattoo of a small cluster
of stars on the inside of her right ankle. I look at her
through the corner of my eye, picture her
washing my dishes, heels among the stars, her laughter
reaching out into space, soap bubbles
becoming little globes, planets from her hands.

Benjamin Russell will graduate from the MFA Program at New England College in January. His poetry has appeared in several smaller magazines, most recently in RE:AL. He was co-director of the award-winning Mad Poets' Cafe program at the Warwick Museum of Art before its closure. He teaches high school English in Providence, Rhode Island, where he is also the moderator of the Student Poetry Union.

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