Those Days
Those Days
I remember only its ghostly aftermath;
my parents' divorce.
My dad was cast out without anything,
we lived in a rented renovated barn.
My bed was in the hay loft,
and sometimes it was as if
I was an explorer, climbing a ladder
to a secret tree house in the jungle,
other times I knew too well
of our poor situation.
Books sat collecting dust
in the moving boxes,
with nowhere to be rested.
An old square TV was propped up
on a construction cart by our kitchen.
The girl whose mother rented the barn to us
Was a spoiled rich girl,
Lucy,
younger than me.
She had a pink bedroom
bigger than my living room.
She made fun of my brown hair,
and ‘freaky gray eyes.’
On my fifth birthday, she gave me one of her old dolls.
It was worn and broken,
and she gave it to me in a plastic Shaw's bag.
I liked it and played with it all the time.
We cut a small tree down every year,
never a real Christmas tree,
and decorated it with
laminated pictures of Bob Marley
attached to bent paper clips.
Those were the early days, the ones I didn't understand, the ones that don't feel like they actually happened. I wonder what Lucy’s up to.
The Voice
February 2025
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