by Ashly Curtis
My best friend and I ice skated on the kitchen floor,
twirling off wooden chairs, gliding across tile
in our pink ruffled socks. Salchows, Lutzes, even
a rare triple axel or two. It was 1998. Olympic season.
We held up handmade signs in the living room,
blocky marker letters cheering on the figure skaters;
Tara Lipinski etching beauty with her blades, carving
ballerina. My grandmother always called me, long distance,
when figure skating was on the TV. Without fail,
every championship, competition, televised dance,
the phone would ring, dramatic music in the background:
turn on channel 5 she’d say, it’s on right now!
Years later, I called her once, to let her know it was on
and she said, I never liked figure skating, I just knew
you did. If I catch a glimpse of it now, flipping channels,
I can almost hear the phone ring, feel
the kitchen tile slipping away under my socks.
Ashly Curtis is a part-time poet and book professional living in the Midwest. She is a poetry reader for Barstow & Grand and Co-Editor-in-Chief at The Green Light. You can find her work in twig, Barstow & Grand, the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Calendar (2019, 2020), and Ghost City Review. She tweets @ashlurtis.
(And check out Ashly’s poem Putting On Face Cream In Front Of The Mirror from the January 6, 2020 Weekly. – Elephants Never)