by Nancy Krygowski

The store that sold my red girl shoes
was across from the dentist who didn’t use Novacaine,
who shoved my mouth open and tugged

at my problem teeth, then offered me suckers
in primary colors while my mother pulled coins
from the bottom of her purse.

The shoes were corrective. I don’t know
what was wrong with my feet, didn’t understand
why I couldn’t have single buckle black patent leather.

The red was oxblood, a word I understood
though I’d never seen an ox or the smear
of brown-red on underwear, knew only blood

thin as a geranium petal from flesh freshly nicked.
When my mother looked down at my deeply red feet
she saw my difference and what she and her other kids

couldn’t have—bags of pink-red pistachios, quarts
of black-red cherries, red velvet cake slices asleep
on paper doilies, a new coral-red lipstick named Fire

and Ice. The shoes were stiff as the arms she wouldn’t curl
around me and my deformities. I need to believe
each of her sacrifices made me able to run.

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Nancy Krygowski is the author of The Woman in the Corner, named one of the top 100 (or so) poetry books of 2020 by Library Journal, and Velocity, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She teaches in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing program, and is Co-Editor of the Pitt Poetry Series and the Pittsburgh Bureau Chief of the tiny newspaper, Tiny Day.