Upstairs our parents’ smoke

curled into cursive, floated out

the open window, with bickering

over Gabriel Heatter’s War,

Ah, my friends, the news is good tonight

until mist haloed just lit half moon

street lights and someone’s mother

bellowed through fire escape bars,

Time to come in.

 

So we left behind the chalked boxes                                                                                    

those scrawled rows on the sidewalk

filled with names of men

we might marry: Dwight, Cary,

Montgomery, Clark.

 

And under them the number of kids

we might bear: egg-shaped zero

to ten and where we might live:

Mandalay, Shangri La, Timbuktu or Tibet,  

names learned by rote in geography class,

syllables we rolled on our tongues

like exotic fruit-shaped candy.

 

We fluttered like breeze buffeted

butterflies over our cemented 

futures, which would streak, gutter bound

with the next rains. We would return to

our stuffy, overcrowded apartments

 

forgetting the colors of bridesmaids’ gowns:

azure, cerise, mauve, magenta—

colors we’d never seen but heard swirling

in radio ads before we had TV.

 

From They Abide (March Street Press).

Used here with the author’s permission.