Max Jacob's Shoes

So for one of my many internships I co-curated the literature read at Intersection's Independent Press Spotlight Series. I got to read a lot of amazing writing and here is one of the pieces that I absolutely fell in love with (although it was not ultimately chosen to be read). It is written by Ray Gonzales and appears in Issue 20 of New American Writing.

Max Jacob's Shoes

They were found after his death by someone who needed shoes. When this man plucked them out of a mountain of trash, Max Jacob's shes came alive. They fit this person as if truth had never left and he slowly walked away from the filth. It took him a few days to realize he wore the shoes of a poet. The black shoelaces started talking to him in his sleep, the poems drifting out at night, floating beyond the man's bed to recite themselves to life. Max Jacob's black shoes glistened as if they had been shined yesterday, the sleepy man looking over the edge of his bed as the talking shoes tapped a clicking message that said a man who wears someone else's shoes is a man who knows how to get along in life. When he put them o n in the early light of dawn, the shoes quit reciting poetry and led the man to a quiet church Jacob would have never entered. The new owner of the shoes went into a church for the first time in over thirty years, the shoes echoing across the silent sanctuary where a surprised priest waited, sensing the approach of Jewish shoes. After the stranger revealed his sins to the priest, he emerged from the dark confessional and looked down at this bare feet. He went back into the tiny chamber, but Max Jacob's shoes were gone, their hushed disappearance casting a steady light of awareness on the barefoot man, the helpless priest, even the two mice in the sanctuary who revealed themselves to no one that night as they busily gnawed on a pair of twisted shoelaces.