WHEN I WAS STRAIGHT
A ruler was called a straight-edge
Straight talk was smart talk
A straight man was funny by proxy
Sober people walked straight lines
A straight face was useful for poker
Straight-laced was superior to rash
Straight As were the standard for achievement
The righteous path was called The Straight & Narrow
Good girls were always straight as an arrow
With a straight bat was the way to play sport
A straight-shooter never minced words
Peter told Wendy straight on till morning
Do you follow me? Did you get it all straight?
–
This selection is from Julie Marie Wade’s chapbook When I Was Straight, available from A Midsummer Night’s Press. Purchase your copy here!
Julie Marie Wade is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010; Bywater Books 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir; Without: Poems(Finishing Line Press, 2010); Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011); Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series; and Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Books, 2013), winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize. She is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University.
Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooksBlink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.
