Kansas Isn’t Kansas Anymore

It creeps up on you. One morning
you look down on the floor
next to your bed and notice

that someone shed
a matronly undergarment there
and that someone was you.

You had ordered it without realizing
that shade of beige, that elastic texture,
that shapewear

would look anything other
than sexy as it had on that
buxom young model online.

On you, it looks like it has been
hanging on a clothesline
traumatized in a twister.

Once crisp, tinged sepia now,
back from Oz, apart from
your Scarecrow love, heels clicking,

you find you can never return.
You are no longer Dorothy.
You are firmly Auntie Em.

The farmhands no longer notice you.
They're all fawning over your daughter
in your childhood bed.

She's asleep.
She's running a fever,
but she hasn't coughed yet.

"Her collar looks tight,"
one observes.
"Should we loosen it at the neck?"

You tell him to skedaddle.
To keep his distance.
You wet a washcloth.

Help her body cool. You fashion a mask
out of the old undergarment
based on a YouTube tutorial.

You're all out of wishes. If someone claimed 
your house had dropped from the sky,
you would believe it.