Dream Before My Wedding
Cartoon-eyed girls fill the pews multiplying multiplying until they spill over into the aisle
shrieking laughter that stacks up on the marble knocks the silk petals sideways into clumps the
girl in ivory steps gingerly over as she listens for strains of Mendelssohn faded beneath the
piercing giggles that catch the train of the gown like embers blaze up it in colored streaks of
purple emerald sapphire twining in the girl’s burning hair that cracks into ashes and grows back
silver and the girls are still multiplying waving crazed and wild to the suited man who used to
love them or at least told them once he did or at least made them think he did or at least they
wanted him to but all this time he doesn’t look up from the diamond-crusted circlet in his palm
not even when the piles of girls reach the rafters block the sun from the windows not even when
his silver-haired bride pirouettes in her color-flaming dress raining sparks and blooms not even
when she stops to collect the blown kisses of the girls like favors and tucks them in her hair and
behind her ears and down the neckline of her dress for safe-keeping not until she reaches him
and they listen for each other over the endless laughing and the cracking windows giving out
from too many girls pressed against them and the dancing all the wild bright dancing.
Anna Sandy is an MFA poet at Georgia State University, where she also teaches English Composition. She is the current Editor of New South, & her work can be found in Muse/A, the Santa Ana River Review, Nightjar Review, Indianapolis Review, & others. She lives in Atlanta with her fiancé & three cats.
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