Mirror

Cracked up mirror crunches time on a street corner. Whose mirror is it? When I look for the answer I only see myself – fragmented. Jagged elbows collide with eye brows and a stray knee cap. Parts of a whole spaced wide enough to stretch across one block wide.

I wonder what it was when it was still a working body. A diner mirror or a full length? Did it know it was complete or did it always have that nagging sense of space with sharp edges?

I was standing on the corner looking at these pieces for at least one minute too long before I picked out a shard. An eye. I could see what only pieces of snip-its might recall. In that shard there were a million conversations half cut off, cut up, and sticking. Straight out.

“This neighborhood is getting better all the time.” Bright eyes. Bright teeth. “In just a few years all this will be gentrified.” But that’s only half the conversation.

A rooming house, big old and paint peeled to perfection sits slumped below the hill. A large woman in a floral house dress sits on her plastic lawn chair. Smoking. She looks straight through the conversational shards and into the street corner.

Does she see me or only my back? A chunk is left by the house. Scraps of reflection scattering in the sun.