ABBA and Shawshank, Revisited

The woman in my dream last night told me

she wants to give her husband away. Not on loan,

mind you, but for good. They have such different

tastes in food. She loves to eat dumplings

steamed in a pot of chicken soup simmering all morning,

she wants to drink mojitos all afternoon, the mint and lime

adding zing to her mouth. Who doesn’t want extra zing

in their mouths? She said she hasn’t figured out

what to do with her hands. So when she’s

on the road and comes to a stoplight,

she finger-dances to Abba blaring on the radio:

Ooh, you can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life,

the index finger on both hands kicking a can-can.

The mistake she made is the light turned green

and she stayed there dancing her hands without

gunning the gas and got rear-ended. Now the cop

(dressed neatly with no food stains on his lapel)

wants to know her reason for not moving. She tells him:

Ooh, see that girl, watch that scene, digging the dancing queen,

her fingers kicking in time to the beat, so he

handcuffs her and takes her to the pokey, and

as a lover of irony, she teachers her cellmates

to do the Hokey Pokey. But they only serve slop to inmates,

and she wants more (don’t we all?), so she takes the plastic spoon

and starts scraping in the wall. She figures if Andy and Red

could break out of Shawshank, she can break out

of county lock up. Protect the right for us to bear

dumplings, protect our homes with dough

boiled for 10 minutes, cover on. Anything will plump up

and blossom with steam and enough time. All she had

was an overnight, and it was back to the streets for her,

dancing with her fingers at every intersection, red or green

light shining their bright color on her like a Rothko.