"The room blurs

and I’m in love again"

from today's offering, "Cha Cha – cape corners" by fellow dancer,  poet, and novelist Christine Klocek-Lim.

Cha Cha — cape corners

by Christine Klocek-Lim

She speaks of imaginary walls.

I think of invisible fences. Turn this way,

then that. How to get where I’m supposed to be?

The mirrors are fools. I can’t see anything.

I swivel my hips and the bones creak.

Trees laugh outside while he lifts my arms.

I slip into the first spin,

hands tangled overhead.

Like magic, she says.

The room blurs

and I’m in love again, or falling

in love. My heart doesn’t know it should be careful.

I snap my feet like diamond earrings,

expensive and brilliant. I’m a child

with a silver rattle. Cymbals

clashing in the wind.

The floor shiny as a disco

yet I’m so dizzy I can’t remember the beginning

of the party. He drops me into the right spot,

hips tilted just so, hair askew

as I face the half-wall, then the quarter,

then the half again only to spin into

a chassé, hands tucked

so my heart doesn’t

fall out, glittering

like a top.

* * * * *

"Cha Cha – cape corners" is from Ballroom — a love story (Flutter Press, 2012).

Christine Klocek-Lim won the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry. When she's not reading poetry for Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, she writes novels (Disintegrate, Who Saw the Deep) and is an acquiring editor for Evernight Teen and Evernight Publishing.