“I could live here,” she says, meaning now,
this neighborhood near ours where we’re driving.
It’s a hillside with family houses, the arc where some
trajectory landed, maybe where they’d aimed or just
a little short. There’s even a community pool and
we pass a group of children walking home from it,
their shoulders burdened only with beach towels.
It’s a slow walk, in flip-flops, as if they lived
so close they could be in charge of this place.
“It seems like there’s lots of kids here and stuff,”
my daughter muses, “and my kids would like that.”
She’s skimming her thoughts into the future,
trying them out like the light and smooth stones
I skipped on the river as a kid, so many
miles and years from here when I was her age
and life with my parents was all I knew. She says
what she believes is true, “I’d want a house
with a spare room so you could come too.
It doesn’t have to be a mansion or anything, just
a house like ours, where we live.”
James Patrick Long’s poems have appeared in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Appalachian Review, Kestrel and other literary journals. A two-time winner of the West Virginia Writers Inc. annual writing contest, he is currently finishing his MFA in poetry at Spalding University. Long is a native of Buckhannon, West Virginia.