They said
only certain women wore them—
women who knew too much
about doors
and how to leave.

Red as confession.
Red as a wound
refusing silence.

I found them waiting
at the edge of a life
I almost stayed inside.

So I push my feet in.
They fit.

I am no ugly sister
carving herself smaller
to please a story
never meant for her.

Not glass slippers.
No princess promises.

These are working shoes—
salt-stained, roadwise,
stitched for departure.

Ruby red,
like my lipstick:
the colour of birth
and death.

I am the afterbirth—
what comes after survival.

My mother warned me
about wanting too brightly.

Desire, she said,
has teeth.

But longing walks ahead
of the body.
The heart steps forward
before permission arrives.

Fishnets. No ladders.

When I slip them on,
the floor tilts.

Every smaller version of me
falls away
like shed skin.

They call it dangerous—
a woman choosing motion,
choosing heat,
choosing herself.

They say the shoes are cursed.

What they mean is:

she will not stop walking.

Heel to earth.
Heel to earth.

The pavement keeps time.

I do not look back.

And like spilled pennies,
my departure
clatters like gunshots.

---

Gabrielle Munslow is a UK poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, The Lake, Sky Island Journal, Meniscus, Flash Phantoms, Herlore, and elsewhere. She writes poetry that explores myth, identity, memory, and the uncanny. She lives in West Sussex, England.