By David B. Prather

Featured Art by Karen Renee

We knew what it meant to grow up
in the suburbs, the product of poor beginnings―
the progeny of farmers who readied the earth
with horse-drawn plows, and women
who kept having children

until it killed them,
people who didn’t know anything else,
surviving the Great Depression
by telling ghost stories and war stories
never meant to be believed.

We never let on.
The girl across the street swore
her mother was a full-blooded Spanish princess,
when we knew she was Mexican.
We were too young to know it didn’t matter.

The Pentecostals three doors down,
women with uncut hair and denim skirts,
men with lives like any other, were the only ones
who were sure in their conviction
they were headed for heaven.

The rest of us resented them
because this meant we were condemned,
like the old tool shed down the dead end
where all the kids used to play,
scaring rabbits in and out of the rotting lumber.

We just had nowhere to go
in the middle of summer. So we dared
the clotted vines of poison ivy, itching
the next day, and grateful for the calamine lotion
pinking our arms and legs

in thick splotches through which our fingernails
dragged until the welts broke
and the fluid spread. How it ever stopped
we couldn’t guess. We ran through
the rain-wet grass, mud-soaked when we found

a one-and-a-half-foot nightcrawler.
Not even the boys would touch it
except with a stick to carry it to the breezeway
where we watched the awful thing suffer
the concrete, already half dead anyway.

As fascinated as we were
by the things of the earth, we should
never have realized the sky was blue.
But there it was, hanging over us
large as any relative who came back

from the front line, shell-shocked
and gun crazy, unable to make a living
at even the smallest thing he tried,
or the girl who hated Christmas
for its one beaded necklace,

who never forgave herself for the gift
of scarlet fever that killed her father,
or any of the rest of us who cursed
in the old backward ways, convinced someday
we could care for ourselves. We could let this go.

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David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and Bending Light with Bare Hands (Fernwood Press, 2024). His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Banyan Review, Potomac Review, and many other journals. He lives in Parkersburg, WV.