Tania Rochelle
V4:E3 March, 2002
SADIE
She doesn’t want to go to her father’s,
so she plants herself
like a Lenten rose in my flower bed,
braced against the cold.
Her sturdy body, like a household appliance,
is the only sign
she’s nine years old, and the tears
she’d cry into a lake
he couldn’t walk across
are not a child’s, but like my own,
and she knows I know.
I pretend it’s just a brat’s tantrum,
that she needs me to make this decision for her
because I’m her mother.
The truth is, both of us,
because I am older and tall as an adult,
have played these roles.
She trapped like a veal calf in her childhood,
and me, like a tulip
forced in winter and put out in the yard.
Somewhere in the part of her
that’s plugged into the stars,
she knows what really happened,
the way she knows Eve’s fall wasn’t about any apple,
and the lady with the black eye
didn’t run into a door,
the way she’s always known too much:
that I’m a coward,
childish, selfish, ever drawn
toward heat and my own appointments,
and I want her to go.
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Date of Birth:
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March 21, 1963
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Location:
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Marietta, Georgia
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Email:
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troche4606@aol.com
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Publications:
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Three Candles, The Blue Moon Review, Thunder Sandwich, Iris, Mediphors, New York Quarterly, Snake Nation Review, Split Verse, etc.
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Awards:
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Editor’s Choice Award from Snake Nation Review
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