Runway

By Susan L. Lin

The girl has a body
like a wire hanger, a spindly
metal rod. Been twisted and reshaped
oh so many times.
Mouth that opens,
closes. Wrists spilling
over the plastic armrests of a chair;
legs stretched out in front, bent
at awkward angles.

She flies
to new places, always
to new places, leaving
behind a tail of photographs
to be printed in a glossy magazine someday, lost.

Find me if you can: somewhere between two perfume samples
and a full-page ad for sleep medication. Somewhere.

Her toes are on display for anyone who might stop
to count them,
so count them. Make us human.
She says something about going barefoot.
Something about needing to know the ground is always
still there. You would, too,

if every time you walked away, it was down a path made for planes.

***

Susan L. Lin hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. Her novella Goodbye to the Ocean was a semifinalist in the 2012 Gold Line Press chapbook competition. Her short prose has recently appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ghost Town, Hypertext Magazine, Gravel Magazine, Portland Review, and elsewhere.