No boys. Nights, I was so lonesome I would call Time
to hear a lady say it is three-oh-three.
I made Jello and Swanson’s turkey dinners.
I asked the gym teacher, perky Miss Butler,
a woman whom a month before I would never
have talked to, about salads. Miss Butler
coached the girls’ marching drill team.
She told me she had polio as a child.
People could survive all sorts of things.
She said, “Wash the lettuce first.”
I fried hamburger meat, flames jumping
wildly under the iron skillet. A month later,
my father reappeared, moved us to a dingy
apartment across town. Nights, I would sit
in my mother’s car in front of our old house.
The new owner, a gardener, staked
my mother’s hollyhocks.
I couldn’t see the pale pink, ruby, and yellow
flowers in the dark. But I knew they were there.
Penny Perry has been widely published as a poet, most recently in Lilith and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Her fiction has appeared in Redbook and California Quarterly. She was the first woman admitted to the American Film Institute screenwriting program, and a film based on her script, A Berkeley Christmas, aired on PBS. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee in both fiction and poetry, she was born and raised in Santa Monica, the setting for her first collection of poetry, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012). “Hollyhocks,” which appears in that collection, is reprinted by permission.
Comments
Sign in to comment
Or login with: