Barbara Riley

Chamblee-Tucker Road he summer day had dust in its mouth when we had Vacation Bible School. Two weeks of cherry flavored Kool-aid, psalms to memorize or else, punch-out Old Testament cities to build in a circle, the glue thick, rolled to pieces on my fingers. No names for any of the kids, we came from all over Atlanta. I went with Webb, my best friend but his group was boys and I was a girl. At home, we dug deep holes in the woods. We'd sleep out with a nest of little brothers and sisters all around us. There was no end of talking to do. Telling the Man with the Golden Arm on a dark back porch. GIVE ME YOUR GOLDEN ARM. I wished we knew a hundred more that good. We got bee stings going barefoot never expecting bees dead in the grass, but wearing shoes was worse. My mother wouldn't let me out in the front yard of our rented house on the Chamblee-Tucker Road without a shirt. I argued and argued, I was the oldest. Webb didn't wear a shirt. And it didn't matter to her one bit. I wore a t-shirt, on backwards outraged. I never did get a horse although Webb did. He wrote me once and said he had done his chores, satisfied his daddy, Tal Hughes, that he was responsible. We'd moved away by then, so Webb and me only shared red dirt and ghost stories, the hot summer, when my little brother, the one who slept in his cowboy hat, came up slow and shot us with a willow switch until we had to play dead, at least once every day.

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Issue #6, January, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.