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Remnants

Jozef Lisowski

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Gertrude Stein was famous for the
wooden leg she would display at
parties late at night, whispering
about it by lamplight, walking back
to her cramped apartment alone.

She would say, I am the mother
of all, but we knew, even then,
that that was a lie. And she used
to perform her famous three-wineglass
headstand trick in her drawing room,
but after breaking her last decanter
had to stop.

I saw her wooden leg at a museum
in Copenhagen last week—it was dust-
y and chipped and behind plate glass,
frozen like an acrobat mid-handstand.
As I walk home tonight,
the sky swells purple in the dirty frost
and I think of her.