At Twenty-Eight, poem by Amy Fleury

AT TWENTY-EIGHT
by Amy Fleury

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.

SOURCE: “At Twenty-Eight” appears in Amy Fleury’s collection Beautiful Trouble (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), available at Amazon.com.

IMAGE: “Dance to Meet the Morning” by Gun Legler. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Amy Fleury is the author of Sympathetic Magic (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013). Her poetry has been published in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s column, “American Life in Poetry.”