Don’t carry a purse but a pocketbook, and underneath
don’t wear a bra and panties
but a push-up Frederick’s of Hollywood brassiere
and a pair of bloomers—nylon, always white, pulled up
as far as bloomers can possibly go.
For your shoes, two options: should you need to go shopping
or get your pressure checked, lace up a pair of white Keds.
Otherwise, it’s house shoes, dust-pink slippers
curled from the dryer into tiny, warm cups for your feet.
Now, every day, every single day, wear the exact same top:
a businessman’s short-sleeve, white. Buy three dozen of them
three sizes too big, cut the collars off, have them bleached bright,
starched twice, and no sense in clasping more than two
buttons at the top unless you’re going out—Grandma’s got to
breathe. These are your button-downs, the only thing worth
hanging in your closet, and the only kind of shirt
in thirty years you’ve worn since you got home,
pulled that girdle and them stockings off,
them high heels too—all that shit—and first put on
one a Monroe’s shirts. It was right comfortable, Fanny said,
I never wanted to wear nothing else since.
The other half of you isn’t covered with pants
and sure as hell don’t mess with a skirt but pulls on
fluffies—soft cotton sweats, rolled up, with all the elastic
ripped out, cause Skinny Fanny ain’t so skinny
no more. Now, you were young once, you remember
being a kid in britches, a pretty thing in capris, and grown,
on Sunday, you wore slacks to Pleasant Grove, that same church
where we grieved your body that had died 1,046 miles away.
The pastor couldn’t remember much—it had been so long
since you sat fanning in the pew—but he could tell
the story of Fanny in pants, back when that’s just not
what women were allowed to do. Your slacks were pleated,
pressed with a crease, camel-hair, and those slacks
strolled towards the altar not because you were one
for women’s rights or your husband built that church
with his own hands back in ’63, but Baptists be damned,
them slacks just felt good.