| *loolaville _poetry | |||||
| Love Tender Unknown You held my hand tightly with a bright red apple in the other when I was small and tan with golden brown knees. Your grin was loose and sweet, mine mischievous, our blue eyes sparkling like the twinkling stars we watched from the front porch, our shoulders squeezed together in the hammock. I, with my scarred finger cracked open from a glass pane by the shed, tasted blood long before my body learned to bleed. And your mother covered the cut in a way my mother and other mothers never could -a drop of ointment squeezed first on the bandage and then pressed over the wound- In a moment I was her daughter, like one of the gray baby rabbits, helpless in a hole in the grass by the clothesline. Up the dirt road the sun set and my legs dangled from the tire swing, rising and falling into the soft cool air. Inside adults drank coffee and laughed while the dog shuffled under their table and chairs. You pushed and I spinned, I tingled you grinned, I thought, please let this last forever, dusk dripping over the cornfields and the wind pushing as the barn doors moaned. You were my love tender unknown. |
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