When We Lived in Ohio
Kate Caraballo
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When we lived in Ohio
with the white house & bleached sidewalks,
leading to libraries & parks & softball games
past the steepest sledding hill
behind the Methodist church parking lot,
where kids would speak words
much too old for them, & exhale smoke
once hidden with the monsters under their beds
When we lived in Ohio
we didn’t know anything
beyond our parents’ blue Jeep Cherokee
beyond grass-stained Nikes tramping down
on the sun-crisped gravel. We slept
in tents for the hell of it, after watching
movie-like portraits of gazeeboed events
& seeing white, smiling faces fold & unfold
in the subterranean summer light.
When we lived there, not here,
then, not now, our parents lived secret lives,
lives we now see so clearly that we force
our mouths to suck in & blow out
the smoke we once thought sickening,
blurring realities we never wanted to know.
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Kate Caraballo (née Weaver) is a poet and fiction writer. Her work has been published by Z Publishing House, Agora, The Carroll Review, Quaranzine, and Poetic Sun. Kate earned her M.A. in English at John Carroll University. She now works as a full-time mom and an adjunct professor at YSU, reads for Chestnut Review and Seven Kitchens Press, and is currently working to complete a chapbook on motherhood and postpartum. Visit https://katecaraballo.wixsite.com/caraballoportfolio for more.
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Posted in Retro Summer and tagged in #boudin, #poetry