This week I’m posting another of those lower-case short-shorts I wrote in the mid-90s, “mama when she’s really pretty.” I was channeling a six-year-old girl when I wrote this. It was published in Chiron Review, a litmag run by Michael Hathaway for nearly thirty years before folding earlier this year.
You could have been channeling me. My southern daddy was forever trying to convince my mother not to take her love to town, that he desired her most. That she was pretty. It wasn’t what she needed to hear, exactly; it was never quite right.
Damn.