In the gray January gloaming, I walk the seven blocks to the post office carrying my boxes awkwardly. The pink sneakers I’ve swapped my office heels for kiss the concrete and the people I pass smile so bright behind their masks, I see their eyes light. My legs are all marigold sun winking with my pink shoed-stride. People wave, and like our hands were drawn up by invisible strings, by magnets pulling us together, I wave too. I like your stockings, baby, they say—the old woman and the man on the stoop, have I ever said stockings? A word my grandma used, she was never without stockings well into her 90’s, her sensible pumps and her four-foot-nothing frame, stockings in summer swelter or Pennsylvania blizzard, snowdrifts of stockings. On this old street, cracked cobblestones and closed up shops, the texture of a city dusty and worn, the people jangled, but fighting, friendly the ones who can’t stop grinning at my daffodil tights, mid-winter sigh—the people I pass, nod, wave, say, I like them stockings, they leave me smiling all day as I veil them under my desk, legs glowing bright, warm.

Kindra McDonald is the author of the books Fossils and In the Meat Years, (both in 2019) and the chapbooks Elements and Briars (2016) and Concealed Weapons, (2015). She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She is an Adjunct Professor of Writing and teaches poetry at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, VA. She serves as Regional VP of the Virginia Poetry Society and was the recipient of the 2020 Haunted Waters Press Poetry Award.