poem for your shoes chris ransick They remained in the front hall of my house these two weeks, gathering heaviness until I could barely lift them. I tried to hoist the left shoe first, unleashed instead a plume of hot debris, Vesuvius falling on a phalanx of scared people, hair & skin afire. Of course I put it down and tried the right. Into vast emptiness I spun, my breath disappearing down the hollow’s utter darkness. I heard my own shoes in the closet leap and clatter, running. I heard the shoes of a thousand people do the same. Someone said when we walk again it will be barefoot like ancient men or mad philosophers, crossing a desert’s rock and sand, our feet grown tough. I am glad to return these shoes to you, knowing you’ll see in my strange dream a poor attempt to find fear’s edge and tear it away, to name it so I can know it. Forgive me. I could not walk a mile and be in a safer place.