Fog fell across the sidewalk
The sky was smoking a cigarette
Blue lips expelling fume wisps
Swallowing the ankles of strangers

Does fog envy water?
It’s clean, seamless motion,
even if that is what it will become?
Or does it fear the moment
it must loosen its grip on the sky?

We got to the entrance of the mall
A revolving door
slicing through the steamy air

Do revolving doors envy hinged ones? 
who don’t need to turn themselves inside out
To be walked through

You enter the hinged door
Quick and jagged
A direct path 

I walk through the spinning one
A choice that is serpentine
Meandering, winding softly,
Slowly

Your face, through the glass,
warped and circled
in quiet orbit.

The glass door dipped, stumbling
Over my palms

Its ridges asked:
Why me?

And I said:
I chose the moments
between your entrance and exit

Why?

Because fog doesn’t fall
to feed the soil,
it only drifts downward
when the sky becomes
too heavy to hold.

I chose the door
That didn’t ask me
To slip from the clouds
Before I was ready

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Bella Melardi is a poet and author. She writes about the political and personal. She attends OCADU.