Mia Sara is a poet and writer living in Los Angeles. After twenty-five exhausting years as a film and television actress she took up writing as a way to avoid night shooting. It worked. Her work has recently been published online in “The Dirty Napkin.” She is a member of The Los Angeles Writers and Poets Collective, and a grateful student of the poet Jack Grapes.

I Want Boots

1

I want boots.

I want black, thigh-hugging,
three-inch platforms
with a lethal stiletto.

I want laces, triple rows,
and studs, and buckles
that jangle with every footfall
onto rain slick pavement,
up the fire stairs, and out
onto the crunchy tar of the roof.

I want to stand in my boots
and survey the roof-scape,
the water tanks,
the steaming grates,
in the chill November air,
to know the solitary thrill
of the urban early-riser,
unseen and god-like
over the dozing populace.

It would be good if there were sequins
somewhere,
and fur, real or fake,
it makes no difference,
it is all my golden fleece,
my highwayman’s cloak,
my mantle, my cape,
my transformational pelt.

I am growing hooves.

I need the boots because
it was never my plan to be the go-to gal
for the Kleenex,
the Bandaid,
the lost grey sock.

Stock the pantry,
stock the fridge,
check
there is always an extra roll
of toilet paper
and a bar of soap.

I need the boots,
the fur, the spangles
so that when I am crouched
on the dry grass
at the edge of the playing field
the other flag football mommies
won’t mistake me
for one of them,
and my son, now eleven,
will recognize
his monster, from afar.

I am scared of mommies,
scared of all that
preening smugness,
needy, greedy, martyrs,
organized, efficient,
toting snacks, and water, and i-phones,
wearing sensible
low-heeled shoes.

Show me
a woman
who is galvanized
by motherhood
and I will
show you
ugly, sad, unglorious,
footwear.

I am growing hooves.

2

The rooftop is windy,
it is a long way down,
without the proper attire.

My daughter was born
at the kitchen door
at three am the morning
of my thirty seventh birthday.

Boom-chak-laka-laka,
boom, boom, boom,
out she came,
because she wanted to.
That is how she is.

Ferocious usurper,
splendid sovereign.

Her brother before her
took his own sweet time,

Mopheaded dreamer
Swaggering Romeo

His birth was
the beginning of me,
and hers, the beginning
of the end of me.

Knowing this,
do you think
I love them less than
the proper mommies?

The mommies who organize carpool,
and volunteer,
and set healthy boundaries.
and call the school to complain,
And barge,
and bustle,
and feel fulfilled.

Mommies who actually enjoy
playing games?

I am a sore loser,
but I am hollowed out with love for my children,
their eyes, cheeks,
knotted manes of honey-colored
tangy sweetness
at the backs
of their furry necks.

I am growing hooves.

The boots, the binding, the trailing feathers,
all kinky camouflage,
of my inevitable decay.

Inside, I am being slowly eaten
(every ass wiped, tear shed, lesson learned,
meal cooked, mess cleared, squabble mediated,
door slammed, game endured)
little shreds of my flesh,
peeled, picked,
exposing the gristle,
the blood,
the still-beautiful bones.

3

The scaffolding has stood these past eleven years
and it will stand,
the filthy plastic sheeting flapping in the wind,
and passersby will stop seeing it, stop wondering what lies beneath,
and when the time comes,
when those who have made, and then broken me
are properly formed, and grown, and ready to jump,
it will come down.
The heavy metal framework will loosen
and plummet, the sturdy wooden planks they trod upon
will slip and slide
down the ghost of the edifice, and crack the cement below,
and dust will rise and mushroom
and reach the tops of the buildings surrounding
and settle like snow on
my new shoulders, my shiny flanks,
my hooves, front and back.

No soft, bitter, lonely,
grasping doormat.
Not a crone, not a wizened
Sexless, toothless, remainder,
waiting on line at Wholefoods Market
with a single doughnut
and a cup of tea.

I am growing hooves,
and a pelt,
and a whip hard tail.

I am a centaur,
Naked, unashamed,
and ready
for the road.

______________________________________________________________________________
My Birthday Suit

It’s a risky business, dressing myself.
Naked, I am least exposed.
I was built from the outside in,
swaddled early in soft fibrous love
grafted onto my raw bones in tight stitches,
so I could bear myself upright.

Now, it’s difficult.
Every morning, I find my seams have gaped.
When I walk from my bed to the toilet,
the burlesque clatter of beads dogs my steps, I leak
a trail of sequins from between my thighs,
attracting the crows.

I am turning inside out.

I can reach inside and finger
the soft wet nap of my life,
and digging deeper into my disgorged trunk,
pull a rag of lace, bitten by my bile
into delicate patterns, to hold up to the light.

My skin is nothing,
I am turning inside out.

I cannot find the dress that was my mother.
Whipcord pleated habit.

The hobbling platform boots that were my fathers’ shoulders
have lost a silver buckle.

A carnival panic rises
from the folds of my true nature
tangled at my feet, in intestinal shreds,

My skin is nothing.

I can’t get everything back inside,
and I cannot leave without it,
I will have to put it on, all of it.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Carole’s Dress

I wore Carole Lombard’s dress the other day.
Galina, the beautiful, the miraculous, the most nimble seamstress
at the corner of 6th and Fairfax had it in for repairs
from a guy who collects pieces like it.

“Miachka,” she says, handing me a heavy limp corpse of oyster-colored satin “put it on for me, I need to see it on a body.”

I step into the cramped changing booth, drawing the shit-brown,
upholstery fabric curtain as closed as it goes, which is never quite,
and lay the shimmering ghost dress on the metal folding chair.
I remove my clothes, avoiding the mirror until I have carefully
raised the dress overhead, finding spaces between straps for my arms
to dive through. It slips down my body in one weighty motion, hugging
my skin like a Carvel chocolate dip, as I turn.

And there, shimmering like a pearl in the dingy half light,
with the stinky hydraulic whine of the bus pulling up
to the stop at the corner of Fairfax at 6th, who is she;
That sinuous being with the sly grin?
A grin that holds promise. A grin that’s out on the razz. A grin,
that hushes the crowd as she walks to her table to meet him.
What secrets she has, she’s keeping close to her chest, just beneath
the smooth nacreous drape of the deep cowl of that dress.

A midnight drive to that inn in San Pedro?
Make a racket all morning until the fishermen come back with their catch and the coffee’s scalding hot at the diner over on the pier.
Fried eggs, and bacon, and oyster colored satin, barefoot
in the chill off the water.

Nobody knows where you are and it’s beautiful to have escaped so cleanly. And there’s nothing but more of the same ahead of you, as the sun
gets hotter and you’re hatching plans, and holding hands,
and ruining the hem of your second skin dress.

Who knew you’d never be old? Never get too slack and tired
to fill out this dress, never live to see the flesh melt away
from the fine high bones of your cheeks.
Here, you are camouflaged in satin. The sky sees only the flint-grey sea dazzled with light. Not even death can find you in a dress like this.

But that’s not the way it happens. Not that life. Not this life.

Not this dress.

This dress demands the unconscious elasticity of youth.

This dress makes a stand for celebration, for time to spare.

This dress has never been late for the party.

This dress has never cared about what’s for dinner or
whose teeth need cleaning, or who will need a math tutor come August.

This dress, warming over my skin will make me late
to pick up my son from karate.

This dress would sooner strangle me than set me free.

This dress could break my heart.

I feel an expectant lull in the flow of Russian banter on the other side of the curtain.

“Miachka. It fits?”

“Like a dream, “ I say, tearing myself away from the woman in the glass.