Mom cleaned the stains off of your wall today.
I use your resume for a bookmark
to the page where you left it
hardscrabble? haricot?
in my dictionary.
I don’t know where to file such a thing.
I’m sorry that I don’t always see you when I look at your daughter.
Sometimes I have to make a point of it.
But I do see you when I look at my son −
that is almost effortless. The fact of him
amazes me anew every day.
He is my hopes and fears in motion, and I wonder
is this what Mom sees
when she thinks of you.
Shannon Connor Winward is a Delaware writer of speculative poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such venues as: Pedestal Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, This Modern Writer (Pank Magazine), Vestal Review, Ideomancer, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, and Dreamstreets, and the recently released anthologies Jack-O’-Spec: Tales of Halloween and Fantasy (Raven Electrik Ink) and Twisted Fairy Tales: Volume Two (Wicked East Press). To read her accounts of writing, witchery, mommyhood, and general sassiness, stop by her blog at http://ladytairngire.livejournal.com.
© 2011, Shannon Connor Winward
Halfway Down the Stairs 