Erin Coughlin Hollowell 

Playground

You were punishment,
I thought. Your eyes
flat as nickels. Your
voice slurred. Shirts
stained with food,
hair too neatly combed.
Scrape of your foot
in the gravel.

I didn’t want to hold
your hand on the empty
playground. Mom and Dad
sitting at a picnic table
watching as you hung limp
and stared at the dirt, rocks,
litter beneath the swings.
I strained for creaking flight.

The dark woods crowded
near the leaning chain-link fence.
No one else brought children
to this rusted no-place.
Only our small family,
quiet in the ruin. You,
the fractured one, held their
sight. In my child’s mind,
even then, I knew there
was no competing
on that front. You were
perfectly damaged.

I sat in the middle
of the merry-go-round,
its surface canted, gritty.
You pushed head down,
slowly circling me.




Erin Coughlin Hollowell lives at the end of the road in a small town in Alaska. has have been published most recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Weber Studies, Terrain: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environment, and Sugar House Review. She received my MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her first collection, Pause, Traveler is forthcoming in June 2013 from Boreal, an imprint of Red Hen Press. Her blog is at www.beingpoetry.net. 




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