encore Poetry
Roxie welcomes you to Libin’s Menswear You’ll find her near the counter where she’s worked for years, always decked out in the same blue and gold outfit, an heirloom of sorts, passed down from the swampy forests of South America to this grove of garments in Kalamazoo. Her pale yellow eyes take in customers as their hands touch lapel of tux, a thicket of ties, trail their way to peaks of plush sweaters, and get lost in knolls of neatly folded pants and shirts. A lady of few words, maybe 40, Roxie parcels out Hellos, while one floor below, a tailor — most likely wearing glasses perched on nose — is basting, stitching, hemming, doing whatever it is tailors do to suit cloth to man. What’s up? Roxie loves a well-dressed man, the big and tall, medium and small. As someone, uh-oh, reaches for the hankies she rubs her nose along her ruffled sleeve while the salesman who’s waited on your grandfather, father, and now your husband carefully writes out a receipt by hand. Here, kitty, kitty, on the corner of Cork, just west of Lovers Lane, customers leave Libin’s with bags and bellies filled with the fiber of good, old-fashioned service. Tomorrow. Roxie bows her green forehead, lifts a spindly leg and waves goodbye. — Jennifer Clark
Wednesday In the early morning darkness the waning half moon peered through the crack separating the bottom of the shade from the top of the sill and reminded me how little light is needed to chase the darkness away. — Linda MacDonald MacDonald, who lives in Mattawan, is a retired pastor who formerly served North Presbyterian Church in Kalamazoo. She is also a poet, opera singer and peace advocate.
Clark is director of community relations for Communities In Schools of Kalamazoo. Her first book of poems, Necessary Clearings, was published by Shabda Press in 2014. Roxie is a blue and gold macaw, with a green forehead.
since 1981
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