Dress up

When I was little, my sister and I wore our Mother’s clothes.

Her blouse sleeves swam around our hands
And our feet slipped out of open tips
In shoes made for showing off her home pedicure.
My costumes in those pictures always surprise me
I remember how they felt
Right
Fitting and grown.

When I stepped into the hospital, the first time wearing my new, bright coat
My hands rattled in sleeves that brushed my knuckles
As I chanted to myself that surely, I was the only one who knew
this outfit was wrong.
I had pressed it twice the night before
While rehearsing lines I no longer remembered.
My script was in a pocket, stiff with starch,
But I wasn’t sure my fingers could find it.
On the outside, before the curtain was pulled
To reveal ‘Mr. A’, gentle and smiling, old before I was born
The Doctor rolls in my sleeves.

“Get them hemmed”.

When I had passed two years

Measured in stacks of binders, late nights, and the seeping in of the beginnings of a new language
They made us new coats,
measured carefully.
I slip mine on over my sweater, sure my shoulders are more set
My back perhaps a bit taller.
Hoping for that old feeling of ‘right’.

Silly
I never did grow into Mama’s heels.

By Christiane Phillips