Lizzy Burnam 🐞

Old lady keeps a cookie tin full of buttons in the back of her car 
after the one time 20 years ago a button popped off the bust of her shirt at a work mixer. 

Old lady’s so small she wears children’s-sized shoes 
and nearly gets run over in the grocery store parking lot; 
“you didn’t even look, motherfucker, fuck you!”

Old lady owns the Richard Simmons “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” workout tape on VHS 
and still exercises to it religiously, in the evenings after a WeightWatchers dinner. 

Old lady with a black-tier casino card 
who can’t help but try for one more hit, “one more hit  for the big one this time” 
before she goes home with three dollars cash and a promise to herself. 

Old lady let herself get fat after the third divorce, 
finding more comfort and delight in one Oreo cookie 
than any of her ex husbands’ floating jellyfish hearts combined.  
“Experience has taught me that if you put all your eggs 
in one man’s basket—He. Will. Drop. The basket.”
 
Old lady with 10 kids, nearly all grown, who winks at her husband 
every night before bed and says, “you wanna try for one more?” 

Old lady doing coke in the backstage of a soon-to-begin burlesque show, 
one tasseled tit hanging out of her unzipped sequin dress, 
who tells the newest stage kitten, “don’t sweat the small shit—and it’s all small shit.” 

Old lady who spends her Sunday afternoons journaling, 
making note of three things that made her laugh that week: 
“1. Granddaughter somehow learned the word ‘indubitably’ and says it to her dolls. 
2. A couple of house finches have built their nest in the hanging planter on the front porch. 
3. I swear I caught a whiff of Peter’s aftershave when I was dressing this morning—it’d be just like him to haunt, of all places, my underwear drawer.”

Old lady who calls her white hair “a blank slate”
and dyes it purple, blue, and green 
to match the colors in her latest landscape painting. 

Old lady with tanned farm hands, raking leaves in her front lawn. 
“The key to staying young is to keep moving—and Bailey’s Irish Cream for a cold.” 

Old lady in Paris, drinking Montrachet with her young lover
and her sleepy toy poodle, both named Guillaume.