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On Learning Your Birth Mother Might Have Watched You Swing

By Witness Magazine
Poetry•Vol. 34 No. 2

by Jennifer H. Dracos-Tice

 

Six years old, hair streaming,
you pointed your toes
toward the undersides of maples
branching through powerlines
looping over the school yard. You rose
from your seat, thumped
on the downswing, pulled the chains,
leaned into the next up-swerve.
Did you kick your saddle shoes
into the littered leaves, did you launch
into crinkled air, did she,
did she, see you there?
When the back legs of the swing-set lifted
from their concrete bases as you swung,
did she, the one who gave you up, who watched
(inside the Packard parked across the street?
behind the oak tree just out front?)
did she bite her inside lip,
did she lean and call
don’t slip?

 

 


Jennifer Dracos-TiceJennifer H. Dracos-Tice has poems published or forthcoming in Psaltery & Lyre, Crab Orchard Review, San Pedro River Review, Stirring, Still: The Journal (2016 Judge’s Choice Award), and other publications. A long-time high school English teacher, she lives just outside of Atlanta with her wife and their kids. Jen can be reached at jendracostice@gmail.com.

Twitter: @JenDracosTice
Instagram: @jendt1

 

 

 

Witness blends the features of a literary and an issue-oriented magazine to highlight the role of the modern writer as witness to his or her times. Launched in Detroit in 1987, the magazine is best known for showcasing work that defines its historical moment; special issues have focused on political oppression, religion, the natural world, crime, aging, civil rights, love, ethnic America, and exile. The issues “New Nature Writing,” “The Sixties,” “Sports in America,” and “The Best of Witness, 1987 – 2004” eventually appeared as university press anthologies. In 2007, Witness moved to Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The magazine publishes one print issue and one online issue a year, and increasingly seeks out work that contextualizes the American experience by highlighting issues of global concern.

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