My first wedding dress—not white,
not wedding. A frock bought off the rack
for more than I had ever spent.
Light gray with blue and rose blooms,
wide muslin collar, from the eighties.
Now, not quite vintage.
The dictionary says vintage refers to wine.
The day I wore the dress,
we eloped and drank Champagne.
Today I am saying goodbye
to the jack pine pitched precariously
on its slope, a tree I could not trust,
but I had not planned on letting go
of this dress that slides
free of its flimsy dry-cleaning sheath.
To the sound of chainsaw, woodchipper,
I fold crepe as light as a rough cloud.
The fabric slips in my hands.
I valued the past in things, and after
he died, saved this husk of my old self,
though I had remarried, moved here.
The dress goes in the sack for Goodwill.
For the sake of making space, a new life
on some other body.
Sake, Merriam-Webster claims,
comes from guilt—in keeping the dress,
keeping the pine when it could fall,
guilt in the burden of giving them up.
Outside, a new patch of sky.
The empty places left.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 3.
Joannie Stangeland is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently The Scene You See. Her poems have also appeared in The MacGuffin, North Dakota Quarterly, New England Review, and other journals.
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