Unwriting My Story

Let me spin my story anew

We didn’t live in Guernsey Hollow, so why would I care

if I might have had to snap potato bugs in a small garden

that we could have had across the road

on a little sliver of land beside a brook

that may have flowed there

and probably did for someone else

that really owned the property

and whose little children slept three-in-a-bed

in winter in the house that Harry Turner wanted to demolish

in some sort of frenzy to fix it up for re-sale

by tearing sections off first

and you could only reach the second floor

through a trap door in the attached shed

because the front stairway had been torn off

with that section of the home in the house

that Harry Turner would like to have rebuilt

I never spent a night in St. Albans Bay huddling

under a WWI army coat in a summer cabin

unfortuituously in the month of March,

never located snakes for my brothers

among the cracks in the rocks

on a hillside near the campground,

nor swam in Lake Champlain, no,

I couldn’t have done any of that

because we never lived there, never

breathed that damp air all one summer

before the job in the plastic factory dried up,

or would have, if my father had worked there,

but he didn’t, and he never brought home

sweet potato mouth organs and plastic whistles

to us kids in a small lakeside resort town

that we never lived one spring and summer in

I never lived in New Jersey, nor did I steal apples

from carts in second grade, no, my brother didn’t get hit

by a jeep driven by a guy who just came home from the war,

any war, but maybe one in particular that he didn’t come home from

and Mother said the guy thought he was still driving his jeep in Germany,

but she couldn’t have said that because we didn’t live in Paterson

over the Haledon line where they had the prettiest pansies

on Mother’s Day which my father and I didn’t buy

for my mother

No, the jobs in Vermont weren’t scarce

And I could have stayed there

So none of this would have played out,

I wouldn’t have moved to Boston

and if I never worked at Merrill Lynch

and never met him, never lived any of this, Dick Powers name

wouldn't be on a stone in a small cemetery in Brookville, MA

in Holbrook, MA

©2017 Muriel Thumm