One Thing

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.

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