It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
for A. How the days passed, suffused in summer light, your curiosity caught by every clover- filled crack in the sidewalk, every brick alcove in the parking lot, where I said now be a duckling! and you fell in line behind me, quacking, every moment, a bright Bonita peach, bitten and dripping down the chin, because soon our family would be four, not three—for you, age two, an uncertain concept, four fingers lifted to mean possibility beyond measure, which is how I felt, too, soaked in the sweetness of our play, make-believe in the backyard. Unlike two, which we’d mastered, or three, a flight you felt coming, claimed each time you reached farther, higher, whenever we swung you, one—two—three! into the air, sandals flying in the face of the unknown. I can’t know, you used to say, which was far truer than you knew, each number counted to its end, our life just begun.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, the Nautilus Gold Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Yale Review, Indiana Review, and The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. She teaches poetry and tends a hillside in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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