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Janet Lynn Davis
shards of rainbow
spattered across the floor. . .
this pause
in my afternoon
to study the hues
eighty-one,
my father building
new closet shelves,
once more rearranging
the deepening layers
those young years
I spent trying
not to be him;
now, in photos, me
with the same stern jaw
a girl whose dolls
were all neatly clothed
and coifed. . .
not knowing then
that I'd have no children
our sidewalk art
back then—hopscotch squares,
no space
left unchalked
from her house to mine
the short walk back
from grade school,
those wispy buttercups
I'd bring home. . .my mother
still warmed by spring flowers
flip-flops
slap the ground harder
after class—
just seven, but who else
had ever flunked "swimming"?
homemade books—
You can be a writer
my dad once said
though hoping, I suspect,
I'd do something sensible
the neighbor kids
in a semicircle,
waving farewells
that day we drove off
in our Chevy, for good
Janet Lynn Davis is a writer from Texas. Her tanka and other poems have appeared in a variety of familiar online and print venues over the past few years, including recently or forthcoming in bottle rockets, American Tanka, Wisteria, Ribbons, red lights, Landfall (MET Press), Tanka Splendor, and elsewhere.
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