Category: Coming of Age

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02. Snoopy

What does it feel like when you are in fourth grade
and your mom gets cancer?

It feels like that day I brought my Snoopy
lunchbox to school, the yellow plastic one
that snapped closed with a click,
got left on the playground, forgotten.
The next morning that playground was covered
with shards of yellow plastic.

What else can you do but bring your lunch in brown paper bags
for the rest of the year
for the rest of every school year to come
and pretend you like it that way.

—Megan Willome, reprinted from her series My Mother’s Diary

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Bon Voyage

We’ve gathered on the dock. Mother wears a custom-made suit, bold black and white checks, the skirt fitted tight. My sister and I teeter beside her, two untethered buoys, dresses buoyant in the breeze. With her hand shading her eyes, Mother watches the ship, a sailing city crowded with waving couples against a white, white exterior. Bon Voyage, Bon Voyage, we cry to friends of Mother’s, the wife barely recognizable beneath a veiled hat. Corks burst from champagne bottles; shrieks as the bubbling liquid pours over hands and arms. After the ship retreats with an exaggerated Honk, we huddle in the back seat of the car. Let’s pretend we’re sleeping on the ship’s deck chairs, we whisper, and imagine the evening growing colder. Clinging together, our shivering bodies wrapped in widely striped towels. Two girls alone on a boat, the water black and rushing past, lips salty.

—Tina Barry
 

From Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016). Reprinted with permission of the poet.

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Hurry

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

—Marie Howe

“Hurry”. Copyright © 2016 by Marie Howe, from THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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And My Love Goes With Him

in bursts of static song over a short-wave radio
in the coldest winter tucked into his blue wool socks

through the red, muddy water in the gutter after rain
in the cornerstone of the ground floor of his dormitory

woven into the wonderful purple of a southern twilight
and the strutting peacock of a clear mid-afternoon sky

up a steep ladder, down a steep hill: wherever he draws
breath: the oxygen, the carbon, the nitrogen, the pine

—Donna Vorreyer, from A House of Many Windows

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Question in the Face of Devotion

She has her sights set on India
her face holds a goddess glow when she shows me
the project on a cartoon colored map.

Her green eyes shock me deep into my green heart
she is a whisper in a silk sari
rose-gold bracelets sing on her brown wrists.

Will she disrobe in Goa
swim in the Arabian Sea
make a string bikini offering
leave her hammer on the shore?

She left her running shoes on my doorstep
I hold them like a cat’s trophy, see the shape of her
toe in the leather, feel the bending of her soul.

—Vicki Vener Iorio, from Poems from the Dirty Couch

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Window

Outside, the Maple seeds turn as they fall,
turn in complex spirals from their branches.
Sleep, baby, as I rock, as the Maple sways
in the gusts of air, shaking loose its twirling birds.

I have been you, wrapped warm near a forgotten pane,
seasons rushing, now it seems, through dresses, shoes,
cap and veil, the leaves rolling behind my eyes,
over Fall lawns, then buried under flawless snows.

What shapes and sound conspire to bring you dreams,
before you discover the scattering force of the world.
There will be a morning when you rise and find a road away
from me, my love left pressed like Maple leaves in a book.

Years will pass in pages I write to keep you
in my heart; the years will turn in orbits near and far.

For now, by this window, I hold you, your touch
like the small fingers of the rain—beyond us,
the leaves, and the indifferent arms of the wind.

—Richard Maxson

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Shade Half Drawn

How strange: the only people out, these two
a girl, her aunt or grandmother

strolling
statelier than lilies grow

in weather they make a small crowdedness
for warmth, fly before the rain like chaff

immune to change they come down the block
as they do day after day

in a small pink coat in practical beige
linked by fingers, the walk home from the store

there is no sound
except the shuffle of sensible, rubber-soled shoes,
the tattoo of first heels

lavender along the sidewalk knots
and unknots its fragrance

the light changes around the window,
stretching, the maple shooting skyward

their hands pull apart
and you want to do something

sacrificial, and magnificent, to preserve
those figures under a turning sky that is not on fire

that does not fill with ash, that lowers only fat
snow clouds onto the roofs and ornamental cherries.

—Anne M. Doe Overstreet, from Delicate Machinery Suspended,
T. S. Poetry Press

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Trip

We met for family time at an indoor waterpark.
After pizza in our hotel room—cheese, veggie, meat supreme—
we cut shoe patterns out of old jeans
to give some soles some hope.

My grandgirl grimaced at the video
of skinny Ugandan children with jiggers.

Next day, she bought a pair of Nikes

82 dollars
and new jeans

in a skinny cut.

—Sandra Heska King, from Casual: A Little Book of Jeans Poems & Photos, T. S. Poetry Press

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New Life

One August, my grandmother wears blue jeans
and thumbs a ride from the Caney Mountain foothills
fifty miles north to the crest of Cedar Gap
and the snaking Frisco line.

On as much steam as her own,
the locomotive crawls into old Las Vegas,
where she baptizes her legs
in the El Rancho swimming pool
just long enough to be snatched up
by a flashy suit.

By sundown, she wears the new life
of a showgirl who never returns home.
Gambler’s dotted die latches at temple and wrist.
The only black and white she’s known before—
local newsprint yielding stories
of falling hog prices,
bumper crops of peaches.

—Dave Malone, from O: Love Poems from the Ozarks, T. S. Poetry Press