Small Town Full of Big Stories
By Gretchen Fletcher
Every porch in Westernport held scandal,
the details of which my cousin whispered
as we rocked on her front-porch glider
covered with a gritty layer of coal soot
from the mill where everybody's father worked.
Across the street was the man whose father killed himself
who lived next door to the lady whose son played with paperdolls
whose house was attached to that of the man who yelled at his wife
and threw rocks at the three-legged dog who gimp-romped past us
every day with the neighbor boys when they went to the ballpark,
shouting at the retarded girl across the way as they passed her
porch.
We debated going to watch them play but decided instead
to rock and talk some more on her porch while our precious stacks
of Archie and Jughead, Wonder Woman, and Dick Tracy
lay unread around us on the porch, their stories pale by comparison.
Gretchen Fletcher
Gretchen's poetry has appeared in The Chattahoochee
Review, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Pacific Coast Journal,
Northeast Corridor, Inkwell, Appalachian Heritage, Pudding Magazine,
Footsteps: A Journal of Contemporary Writing, About Such Things,
and in anthologies, like the recently published Proposing on the
Brooklyn Bridge: Poems About Marriage. Her poems have been performed
by dance troupes in Palm Beach and San Francisco, and appear in a
2003 date book published in Chicago. Her personal essays, mainly about
travel and nostalgia, have been published in Prevention, South
Florida Sun-Sentinel, Miami Herald, Sunshine Magazine, The Lookout,
Fate, Fan, The Catholic Digest, Mature Living, and an anthology,
Traveler's Tales: Ireland. Gretchen teaches fifth grade at
Christ Church School and leads poetry and creative nonfiction workshops
for the Council for Florida Libraries and for Florida Center for the
Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress.
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