She just wanted one thing
and of all the things that happened,
uncountable really, the starry
display over tract housing in the
1970s, rogue phone calls in the middle
of the night from wayward brothers
and a lost niece, the unharkened screams
from county hospitals of the five sons
she brought forth somehow
from a man who traipsed between
cell bars and lounge bars
and barely looked our way; from
the mid-town, shoe leather Catholicism
that was fashioned either to support
or implode communities, to the alienation
that awareness begets,
she perhaps was never meant to know
how gelid things become, what with
such an Irish tint below eyes
as blue as the crocuses that popped up
along her driveway the week she
succumbed, which was just a couple
of years after she caught on…and decided
to trudge on anyway.

Dan Kelty is a high school Spanish teacher in St. Louis, MO where I live with my two children. I have previously been published in White Pelican, Margie, Nimrod and other publications.