The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Sandy Gingras' "Not Even Close to What She Planned On"

Boom

Jeff Bannon pooped in the driveway
when we were playing hopscotch
right on the number five square.
Boom. He wasn’t allowed in my yard ever again.
Let this be a lesson to you, my mother told me.
I don’t know how she knew it wasn’t dog poop.

That was the summer Johnny Neely and I played
with matches and the Neelys’ shed caught on fire
and instead of telling someone, we just watched
as the gas can for the lawnmower exploded
and blew the roof clear into the next yard.
You see what happens, my mother said.

In August, a zookeeper let all the animals out of their cages
at the zoo near our house. My mother said he was
just making trouble, but I could understand it.
My mother drove her Buick down to Sugar Pond
where the lions were drinking and shot
one with a tranquilizer dart.
She really did.
She was that kind of person.

This selection comes from the poetry chapbook “Not Even Close to What She Planned On” by Sandy Gingras, which is available to purchase here from Diode Editions.

Sandy Gingras is the author and illustrator of twenty-five illustrated books. She also wrote a mystery novel, SWAMPED, which won the Crime Writers Association’s Debut Dagger Award in 2012. Her poetry and memoir pieces have been published in many journals. She designs stationery and gift products for several companies and owns two retail stores. She lives with her husband, son and Golden Retriever on an island six miles out to sea off the coast of New Jersey.

Jennie Frost is a Jewish, Appalachian poet from Maryville, TN. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Anomaly, Kudzu, Glass Mountain, Sink Hollow, Indicia, Mochila, Stirring, and Political Punch, an anthology on the politics of identity from Sundress Publications. She is a three-time winner of the Curtis Owens prize and beginning in January, she will serve as the Writer in Residence at the Sundress Academy for the Arts.