A Woman You Know
by Jo Angela Edwins

On Sunday nights, she paints her nails
a different shade of pink each week
of the month. Her antique radio wails

old songs she loves, but her memory fails
her every other lyric. Her sleek
fingers stretch as she paints her nails

with late-night intensity. The color trails
to her knuckles sometimes, when her hands shake,
as they will. As they will. The radio wails

a ballad about some sad lover’s travails,
fever, whiskey, moonlight, heartbreak,
the same old story. She paints her nails

through tears sometimes, that damned female
cliché. She is anything but weak,
although often alone in the dark, she wails

to no one there. Surviving entails
dying a little each day. Her cheeks
are flushed with living, as pink as her nails.
Her eyes dance like dragons. The radio wails.

From The Literary Nest archives