The Turning Leaf Journal

Dressed and Disorderly
By Angela Townsend

If you would like to see my teeth, say the words: “age-appropriate clothing.” I will flash a courteous smile. I am baring my canines. 

Perhaps you do not know that I am a stealth suburban liberator. I have seen you trudge into Chico’s, where the earrings are knots like little fists and there are no blouses the color of fruit punch. I have longed to lasso you with my jump rope. 

Very well, you are seventy. But you listen when I am incoherent. You polish my mettle when I quiver like a teaspoon of tapioca. You exist outside age. Your collarbone fits my head even when it runs empty. You absorb my tears like dew. Such shoulders are entitled to a brush with crystal chandeliers. It is irrelevant that your lobes droop. Maybe when you are eighty and I am fifty, we can get giant discs in our ears, like boys who snowboard and women who carry water jugs south of the Sahara.

If you persist in dressing like animate oatmeal, I will take bold measures. I will scrawl on your Facebook wall that you are shakshuka. All your friends will see. I will give you a hundred-dollar gift card to Forever 21 for Easter. I will remind you that Jesus rose so you could participate in the scandal of wearing a hibiscus the size of your head. 

I will recruit your smart speaker to play “She Comes in Colors” at five-thirty every morning. That is the hour you rise to write the poems. You do not tell your friends that you are published a hundred times. A fat tabby drowses beside you while you repair the world. You deserve a robe of tangerine. The young garbage man waves because you will never not have “it.” I hope he is still assigned to your neighborhood when we get the discs in our ears.

I hope you realize I am doing this as much for me as for you. Do you not know that every freedom fighter’s first rescue is herself? I writhed in the straitjacket. I am acquainted with war. I trusted in ribbed shirts that betrayed my navel. I darned free threads down like convicts. I blasphemed against my eyelashes, tarring them into spiders when they deserved to dance the tarantella. I believed the right skirt would cause a good flannel man to send me lemonade across the coffee shop. I believed dutiful garments would make up for the fact that I was a virgin who just wanted to brush my cats and read books like Modern Trends in Finnish Pneumatology. 

I wearied my youth. Forty-three is refreshing. I am a registered Hot Young Thing in fifty states plus Guam. There is no uniform. I still go to the coffee shop. I dispatch five Sweet n’ Lows into my coffee while people in aprons stare. I add a sixth. I am here to smile with my teeth. It is not my responsibility to adhere to assigned seating. 

If I believed you enjoy masquerading as elderly, I would leave you alone. But you are shakshuka. Me? I happen to be Honey-Nut Cheerios. I am sympathetic to fleece. I have longed for puff-paint sweatshirts with chickadees since I was young by the unimaginative definition. I am my own iteration of inappropriate. If my inner mee-maw ever overlaps with my actual age, it will be a coincidence. Fortunately, I will have the discs in my ears to keep garbage men and flannel men guessing. Shall we make the appointment now?

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Angela Townsend (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize nominee, seven time Best of the Net nominee, and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, CutBank, The Normal School, Paris Lit Up, SmokeLong Quarterly, and underscore_magazine, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College and writes for a cat sanctuary. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 34 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.

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Artwork Source: “I’m trying to decide if this is what I want,” by Susan Barry-Schulz

Artist Statement: Title is a line from a Linda Gregg poem. 9” x 12″ collage on canvas  (magazine and catalogue scraps, vintage blueprints, vintage book pages, vintage National Geographic)

Susan Barry-Schulz (she/hers) is a disabled physical therapist and poet/visual artist who grew up just outside of Buffalo, NY. Her work has been nominated for both Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Rust & Moth, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM, Heron Tree, Bending Genres, Leon Literary Review, Quartet, West Trestle Review, The Westchester Review and in many other print and online journals and anthologies.