One Girl’s Childhood I was nine once, with pigtails and pedal-pushers, white anklets and the scuffed saddle oxfords I wore to school. Children’s faces looking up, Holding wonder like a cup. The best part of my day was when the nuns wrote a poem on the blackboard, clicking the chalk stick, to be copied Palmer-style into my favorite notebook, the kind with blue-lined pages stitched in cardboard covers of mottled black. I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree…. We were allowed to use ballpoint or the new fountain pens with ink in a cartridge that you popped into the spring-loaded tube. I loved the way the dark blue script flowed neatly from my hand onto the paper, its regular darkness my sea of sanity from which I drank the saving wave of words.
Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, ParisLitUp, Meniscus, The Pedestal, Agenda, Gradiva, and other journals. Her seventh and most recent book of poetry is EDGES.
Amethyst Review 