Monday's Poem Charleston Queen © Shannon Cowan No mush for her, no old-age nursing home. Her joints are bent, but her ticker works on. Of course she lives in the present, but 1927 was the last good year. Charleston competitions, green streets, Jantzen bathing suits in wool that clung to your privates. At the time the river was so full of salmon you could walk across their backs. Days her mother played whist at the Third Street pavilion. Women harped, fanning their faces with score cards while she flea-hopped to the orchestra before drifting around Lost Lagoon in a canoe. Ukulele in hand, she crooned with girlfriends who disappeared—one by one— into matrimony. Somehow she outlived them all. Now her apartment is full of dust, boxed dinners, aluminium cane, second-rate television programs demonstrating the two-step. If she could get the right music, find her way to the mall, she'd show them a thing or two about dancing. How her body is rhythmic bone, muscle, a thinning skin remembering saxophone, drumkit, and strings. How the notes go all the way to her centre, fanning out again, before breaking into flames.

Shannon Cowan recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. She is the recipient of the Norma Epstein Award and was shortlisted for the 2002 CBC Literary Competition. Oolichan Books published her first novel, Leaving Winter, in 2000. Photograph by Hydemann Art of Photography.