Tania Rochelle

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.

Date of Birth:	March 21, 1963
Location:	Marietta, Georgia
Email:	troche4606@aol.com
Publications:	Three Candles, The Blue Moon Review, Thunder Sandwich, Iris, Mediphors, New York Quarterly, Snake Nation Review, Split Verse, etc.
Awards:	Editor’s Choice Award from Snake Nation Review

- March 2002 - Dear Anna Sonnets in a Land of Prose Calling The Minnows Oxford Blue Ficus Aurea Playing it Back what we will plant unto the breech some more Ars Poetica Elegy For My Mother Standing Under a Street Lamp on the Corner of Brice Court Escaping the terrible fish Sadie song for stephanie it will always be the season of famine somewhere Adieu - John Turner's Best Of - the disgruntled women's chorus sings accompaniment on the beta male blues How to Build an Impossible Staircase Trying to Raise the Dead How to Kiss The Grassfires of the Resistance Rishikesh