Was a little blonde toddler
with large sky-blue eyes
Born to Ernie Green and Sally Martin
in a modest home in Fort Worth, Texas
then passed off at three to an aunt and uncle

She was charming, cute, she couldn’t get
enough of that thing we call love
She grew into a bright adolescent,
achieved high marks in school
She slept on handmade pillow cases
and played with redwood dollhouses
her Daddy made her

As a teenager she started noticing older men and
the way they looked at her in her cheerleading skirt
She started sneaking out of the house

When she was home she ate wholesome meals
and after dinner her artist mother would photograph
her wearing vintage gowns with fur collars
in black-and-white film
Her mother thought
she was just beautiful
And she was

At eighteen she was in so deep her
parents persuaded her to join the Army
She did but was sent home after two weeks
for bad conduct

My mother met my Dad on a camping trip
and attached to him like a leach
He didn’t mind at all and next
thing you knew they were pregnant
My father proposed while sitting with her
inside the Nova and they wed down
at the courthouse, she wore a blue dress,
I’ve seen pictures

A year or so later, after I was born,
my mother looked around the little house
with the fire needing stoked and the
baby needing fed and she said,
I’m nineteen, to helk with this
She flew the coop and changed her name
from Darlene to Brenda

Sometimes I imagine she’d chosen to stay,
and got a decent job as a nurse or a receptionist
down at one of Crescent City’s little clinics or something

That didn’t happen
but I do want her to know,
We never wanted you to go