Hidden in her coat was a picture of a church with the dogwood in full bloom, and memories of swearing men every other night crowded her thoughts... nights loomed large, and loneliness settled on her like a shroud of fog, and her shoelaces were always knotted in a bunch... her eyes were like sharp knives, and cut every person who looked straight at them... she wore rings on seven fingers, mostly gifts from three ex-husbands, and she still had a book she had when she was five that she fought her brother for... women always avoided her and men in their sixties always seemed to catch her in a fishnet of eyes... most of what she wore was knitted from yarn which she bought at the crafts store, and she kept two knitting needles in a small bone-colored purse, and they stuck out one end... she had a fourteen year-old cat with one yellow eye and one pink, a yellow tabby with rough fur that always fell out into the carpet... a bowl of hard Christmas candy sat on her table that had not been touched in almost ten years, and the pieces were glued together, a solid mass of hard sugar... dust gathered everywhere around her small apartment, on costume jewelry trinkets that laid out, scattered on oak bureaus and dressing tables, and she counted the days, and she counted the weeks, and she counted the years on a calendar with paintings of small town life that hung in her bathroom until she finally passed away...
I like the flow and I like the confident accumulation of the detritus that makes up a life. You're moving in the right direction. Gotta change that ending though. Too blase for a poem of such meticulous development. Write on!
