POEM OR STORY

Childhood was a story, a journey, it was a place

one had to leave. Whatever I read,

I wondered if it was a poem or a story.

My mother said it was a story if it had an ending.

But poems ended too, I thought. Or else

they were middles. A journey might be a story

where the ending is a place. I wondered

too much, and wondering was a kind of place, too,

somewhere in the middle. I had no memory

of the beginning. My life from its start

was an expanding middle, my mother’s.

Was I a poem, then, or a story, was I

taking a journey?  As a child, we dressed up

in our Sunday clothes when we flew on a plane.

If traveling with our parents, we sat in the back

so mother could smoke. A cigarette was a story

that ended when a little pile of ash had

mostly landed in the lidded metal box

embedded in the armrest mother and I shared.

She’d send me into the convenience store

to fetch a pack, Benson & Hedges Ultra Light

Menthol 100s, and candy cigarettes for me.

Chalky white with hot pink tips.

I carried them in a patent leather purse

next to my Avon lipstick samples, and smoked them

when she smoked. And left a lipstick print

on one end like she did too. Smoking had a beginning

and an ending and a dreamy middle part

that was time passing. Other times,

if my brother and I flew on a plane alone,

they put us up front, once in first class, where

we were served a breaded chicken cutlet

on a gleaming ceramic plate. When I cut into it,

melted herb butter pooled from its middle.

As if it were a poem, I thought.

The flight attendant called it chicken Kiev.