About Liz Abrams-Morley

This morning you’re thinking about shoes, of a painting your sister is trying to complete, socked feet of all those young men, her son’s friends come to make a shiva call, to visit a mother in shock, grieving, boys removing sneakers so as to not soil her carpet.

Fifteen years later, she paints what she still sees, that shoe pile by the door. When you watch her, you are mind-walked around

other pedestrian testaments: D.C., the Holocaust Museum— everyone notices the shoe room, your guide says while you try to erase imprinted images: scuffed baby shoes, ragged laces on brown work boots your mother would have said had plenty of life in them still.     Children killed by gun violence

are represented by so many colorful tee shirts over crosses in front of one old city church, and these rustle, ghostly moans in slight breeze, but shoes, one pair for each lost civilian Iraqi set in twos across the grassy public mall in front of Independence Hall look, from a slight distance almost playful,

as if the dead had lined up in a game of Simon Says and Simon said rise skyward, or maybe they were lifted by the pull of a UFO, or perhaps raptured, in any case, called home to a place of bare feet only. Something so present in the absence of the human form,

as you knew Wyeth knew. When you saw his studies for a painting titled The Fisherman, you saw a study in erasure: sketch after sketch of less and less of the man until, in the final oil—a room, fishing boots by the slightly ajar door. Or maybe not ajar. The room you’ve mostly forgotten.

The dead you can’t kick off like old shoes. They slip through cracks, step lightly across the worn floorboards.

Originally published in Solstice Literary Journal (contest finalist), Summer, 2023 issue. 

https://solsticelitmag.org/content/your-sister-wyeth-shoes/