Caroline Giles Banks
If the Shoe Fits…
Boston. Late 1940s. I bike to the general store for penny candy. WWII sugar rations are over. My nickel-a-week allowance is back!
The shopkeeper says there is a new machine that takes pictures of feet to custom fit shoes. Do I want to try it? Curious, I slide one foot, then the other, into the Paul Bunyan–size box. With a click and a clack, my shoe, sock, flesh vanish to reveal 26 white bones.
Enticed down this rabbit hole of wonders, I reduce then resurrect myself, again and again.
It is years before I relate my girlhood game with the corner store’s X-ray machine to diseases of radiation exposure.
Good & Plenty candy
no thing is
what it seems
About the Author
Caroline Giles Banks, born in Boston, is a cultural anthropologist whose poetry is often informed by her anthropological training and research. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Pressing Matters: Haiku, Senryu, and Haibun Poems; The Clay Jar: Haiku, Senryu and Haibun Poems; and The Weight of Whiteness: A Memoir in Poetry. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Your haibun resonates with me. It brings back memories of my own experience with the X-Ray machine in the shoe section of our local department store. As a child, I only tried slipping my feet into it once. My mother wouldn’t allow me to try it again. How wise she was.
This is an incredibly powerful poem. My heart is still pounding. Thank you.