Revision
on the timeline, I’m a map of wrong turns
detours—15, should have buried myself in computers
like my friends, at seventeen, should have buried myself in schoolwork,
taken advantage of my early college admittance, at nineteen
my father asks, you still think you’re going to be
an astronaut? at twenty, lectures on how
real writers spend eight hours a day writing, not three
twenty-one, my boyfriend asks me how I can justify
spending so much money on postage to
send out manuscripts when I don’t have anything
in the fridge.
I hear myself giving speeches on missed chances
to my children, to a son almost out of the house and I
know I’ve heard these lectures somewhere before, I hear myself tell my daughter
about how once upon a time all I wanted out of life was to
someday push an ice cream cart at the zoo
have a big, fat orange cat like the one sitting in my lap
children who loved me, and I think,
no, that’s not exactly true.
Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes for the Minneapolis school district and writing classes at The Loft Literary Center. Her poetry has recently appeared in Borderlands, Slant, and The Tampa Review, and she is the 2011 recipient of the Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her most recent published books are Walking Twin Cities andNotenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch.