The Crayola crayon box on skinny legs
squeezes close to the patch-eyed pirate
on my doorstep, goodie bags outstretched
like ours were long ago—We knew
we were the lucky ones, living
in the apartments, where we scored more
M&Ms and Snickers bars in twenty minutes
than the kids in fancy houses did in an hour.
But it wasn’t the candy that enticed us,
most of mine forgotten on the kitchen shelf
for months after the initial gorging.
It was the whole town complicit
with superheroes and monsters, my sister
morphed into a frog in Mom’s t-shirt and
green socks, Mr. Carson dressed in fluorescent
skeleton bones we dashed past to reach
the fairy godmother at the front door,
our faces upturned and open—
We forgot if we were a kid who couldn’t spell,
a boy sprouting acne at nine. We just fastened
a lion’s fuzzy face over our own and roared.
–
Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press, 2022) and On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books, 2023). A 2022 Pushcart nominee, her poems appear in many journals and anthologies. She lives on the North Carolina coast with the ocean as her backyard and muse.