by Eileen Pettycrew

Students in a Dallas school district must wear clear backpacks after Uvalde shooting.
—NPR, July 19, 2022


Is it enough to say
I’m rooting for you, though I was
never a cheerleader. Enough to say

I’m thinking of you, like a Hallmark card.
Is it enough to say my whole school
had to evacuate, shiver for hours

in the bleachers. She did it on a dare.
Her name was Bonnie, freshman calling in
a bomb scare. Is it enough

my brother cracked like a windshield
and became a stranger. That was
the year I forgot how to feel. The year

of leather drawstring purses girls carried
like dark planets. Tampons, lip gloss,
gum, cigarettes. Numbness,

my secret crush. Listen to me
blather on. I would have written sooner
but I didn’t know what to say.

And now it’s December.
Is it enough I see sunrise
reflected in my car window,

and silhouetted there,
the bare branches of trees,
still carrying their dose of night?

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Eileen Pettycrew’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in ONE ART, New Ohio Review, CALYX Journal, Cave Wall Press, SWWIM Every Day, and other journals. In 2022 she was one of two runners-up for the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry from Press 53, and a finalist for both the NORward Prize for Poetry from New Ohio Review as well as the New Letters Award for Poetry. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Eileen lives in Portland, Oregon.

by Eileen Pettycrew

A life should leave
room for pain.
Like the daughter
who was angry and wrote
a note to her mother:
I am never talking to you again.
The mother wrote back:
I am sorry to hear that.
What about the bedtime story?
The daughter wrote back:
Okay, that is the one thing.
In the kitchen, a life could leave
a loaf of freshly baked bread
to cool. The fragrance
could waft upstairs,
where the daughter
has picked out a book.
The mother could think
that bread is love
as she sits next to the daughter
on the daughter’s bed.
But the mother is
thinking of the pencil
on the daughter’s desk,
how one pencil can
draw a line 35 miles long.
How she could trace
the line to its end
and still not know
where the daughter
came from or where
the daughter is going
or how long
the daughter will lean
ever so lightly
on her shoulder.

The first line of the poem is from “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” by Kay Ryan.

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Eileen Pettycrew lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in The Normal School, Slipstream, CALYX, The Scream Online Dreams Anthology, South 85 Journal, Watershed Review, Gold Man Review, and others.