Perugia Press
Celebrating poetry by women since 1997

Somewhere in a Dark Auditorium

A ballerina will not stop
inserting her small foot
into a slim pink shoe,
crisscrossing silk ribbons
over the bone of ankle.
Sometimes I slip into the inside
of her body, where the soul
wells into the walls that cup
the music, quivering there
like a diver in a swarm
of tropical fishes, her shape brushed
with undulations of hunger
and wonder, a hundred bodies
of tremulous light. The dancer’s shoes
fill with flesh; her flesh
brims with music. What can she do
with such hunger, such sadness?
What can her body do
but tremble and spill
into dance?