Lucky (2015)
I was changing the day on our pink gingham wall calendar. It was the kind with cloth pieces and velcro backs that you stick up to show the day, the week, the month, and the weather. Taking one day off and putting up another, it was a routine of mine.
There was a jingle in the day pouch. A dime and a penny, I guess the girls hid them there. There was never anything in the pouches but the pieces. I delighted in the surprise of change.
I took out the penny with my free hand and clenched my fist. If the year said 1979 -
I put the penny back in the pouch.
It was.
Vanishing Point (2015)
At least, I thought I imagined it, that morning, when something trickled out of me, the color of weak tea, three nights I had to build a way out and through, the freight of you.
No different than how we peer inside the birdhouse and wonder exactly why she assembled a jumble of dirt, because the roof is quite rotten, and she’s flown away before we could see.
Tight (2015)
Wound up. My shoulders stick my ears, unless I take a walk, I have to, like my grandmother did,
On hot days, she walked us two miles one-way to Burger King, her way up ahead, the two of us filed behind, her speed like mine now, fast.
Was she just doing what her mother did?
Now, my great-grandmother sat and made by hand, curtains, sheets, soup, dough, vestments, costumes and clothes,
Things she sewed in silence one hundred years ago, still have tight stitches, hand stitches. and I think I work hard,
You know what’s really hard,
Taking a deep breath, finding soft hands,
Lifting a sleeping baby off your chest,
Inch walking to the crib,
Laying him down,
It doesn’t always work.
Sometimes he wakes up and you do it all over again