Angie Macri

Sandtown Road

The books about a girl in a full body brace,
wheelchair, cancer were all to say how dare
we even think to complain
if our mothers yelled about our rooms again
or a boy snapped our bra strap for the umpteenth time.
These were better stories we could use to fill our mind
than princesses with stupid shoes or hair
or witches by a blackbird pond
or the ghost of the witch on our road,
the figure of a woman walking alone.
Who was to say the witch wasn’t real, her husband dead,
no children to claim any different,
and that not natural, not wanting children, not having them,
our mothers and grandmothers said in the garden
when they didn’t think we were listening.
It was the week they dusted tassels on the silks
of the sweet corn by hand.
If we got hungry while they worked, then we should have the sense
to get an apple and eat it to the core. There was nothing
a woman didn’t know: how to create from the smallest cells,
how it feels not to sleep free anymore, how light slides
under a door. I knew there was a time when my mother used to smile.
She sang sleep from a town of sand
on down the road, an ordinary house at its center.
Did you know town comes from words older still,
garden, fence, what is enclosed?
To think there was a time when we were glad
you learned to talk, she said into her cup.
The woman on the road chewed on a lock
of hair without thinking
before she stood up straight, suddenly remembering
how her mother warned a spine
can curve, forwards, backwards, sideways,
out of the blue. She flagged down a car on the road
where it’s plain there’s nowhere to go.

Angie Macri is the author of Underwater Panther (Southeast Missouri State), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and Fear Nothing of the Future or the Past (Finishing Line). Her recent work has appeared in American Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Waccamaw. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she lives in Hot Springs. Find her online at angiemacri.wordpress.com.