those years, my daughter asks as she skims family albums. I whisper into the old crate, it’s like you rub out your mistake with one of those first-grade erasers until you tear the page. I lift a yellowed prayer card, a chipped cup, a knotted gold necklace and try to explain, it’s not like he hit me. More on bad days, I still hear his words. My daughter unfolds an old atlas, so why did you stay? I begin to unknot the gold chain, best to be gentle with our mistakes. She grabs her keys, says it’s time to pick up lunch, though she knows I’m not hungry. The day after I left, I had a San Francisco dream, stopping my car on a steep street, walking out to check a tire, watching the car slip out of reach, crash down, knock a streetlight, hit the concrete wall of a nameless warehouse. I fell and cried, relieved that it missed every soft body. Are you sure you don’t want something? My daughter swings her keys and beams for the door. And I say, just be careful out there.
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Marcene Gandolfo’s poems have been published widely in literary journals, including Poet Lore, Bellingham Review, december, and RHINO. In 2014, her debut book, Angles of Departure, won Foreword Reviews’ Silver Award for Poetry. She has taught writing and literature at several Northern California colleges and universities. Marcene is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Mythology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her dissertation explores mythological resonances in the poems of Brigit Pegeen Kelly.