This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Luckyby 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 favorite snack at recess…
Maybe it’s not true,
my uncle’s story
of classmates scrambling
for his apple cores
in the small Kentucky schoolyard.
Maybe they weren’t as poor
as he makes them sound.
But I can tell you he eats his apples
core and all, wasting nothing,
risking nothing like the shame
of having more than
and not enough.
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.