Me, hitting the floor frontside up,
hard. She, all blue-eyed worry, hoping
to teach me the game. Take it back,
your girl-time balance – 

From the tin roof hot on your bare feet,
ample maple tree, pointed picket fence,
nothing to it – hurt the furthest thing
from your mind.

ALICE DUGGAN’s poems have appeared in Sleet Magazine, Water~Stone Review, Tar River Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry East, Nimrod, Sugar House, SAND, Poet Lore and elsewhere; also in a chapbook, A Brittle Thing, and an anthology, Home, from Holy Cow! Press. She’s interested in dailiness, in colloquial speech, the rhythm of voices; in telling stories.