Amy Lemmon
You, a two-year-old with a Goldwater button on your nightstand,
better that the television isn’t color, better that you grab the pull string of your
duck on wheels and toddle to the playroom, dragging a rose-print Turkish towel
down the stairs and across the sculpted carpet, stop to study
the particular green-brown sludge of its color and manage an
alley-oop past the coffee table with the sharp edge that will have its
way with your baby brother’s lip in a couple of years. What are you
lookin’ at? You seem to sneer when Mother steps into the dining room
for a minute to check on her firstborn, the girl she named for a newspaper poem and
a spoiled little sister from a famous book for girls. For a moment it’s just you and her, since the
New One is sleeping upstairs, he’s always sleeping or laughing or eating, but when he cries—this
friend you’ll love like a brother, I swear—she runs, wiping her hands on her apron and scuffing the
linoleum with her rubber-tipped heel, to lift him up, hold him, hum into his neck.