This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Lucky by Amy Watkins, released by Bottlecap Press in 2019. Each poem is an answer to a prompt from Facebook’s “Did You Know” widget, innocuous questions that become risky when answered honestly: “A toy I always wanted but never had,” “One thing my dad always told me,” “If I could bring one person back to life…” The past, like the rural Florida landscape, is beautiful and dangerous.
A toy I always wanted but never had…
My friend says, “It’s not a real Care Bear.”
She says it with disdain, though we are too old
to care about toys, and this one
is a single holdover, one childhood treasure
I keep visible in my teenager bedroom.
She says, “It’s not a real Care Bear,”
and it shouldn’t matter that she’s right,
that it isn’t, that my aunt had a friend
who made the patterns, sewed a different
knockoff bear for each of my siblings
and cousins and me one year for Christmas.
I remember the adults repeating,
“Isn’t it good? Isn’t it clever?
Isn’t it just like the real thing?”
Amy Watkins is the author of the chapbooks Milk & Water, Lucky, and Wolf Daughter. She lives in Orlando with her husband and daughter and a 65-pound lap dog. Find her online at RedLionSq.com or @amykwatkins on Twitter.
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs - September 29, 2023
- Sundress Reads: Review of No Spare People - September 28, 2023
- 2023 E-Chapbook Contest Winner Announced - September 28, 2023