little girls with chocolate cake feet

A two-minute quick sprint
out of a wooden house
with wiggling eight-step stairs
(“our” because we live there,
but is not really ours at all)

and I and my two sisters
are out of reach of our mom’s
arms carrying the fourth
young mouth of the family.

Under a soft-roast summer noon,
bare feet and little town mud
turns into a chocolate cake licking
our tiny toes — mushy and tickling.

Dressed in all white sando and thin
cotton shorts, we dance with the
pair of green blades and the
tender tropic wind, as if we will not

get our asses smacked with
tiny stick from a fallen twig
once our mom, done with
dinner chores, call us back,

“Time to go home.
Time to go home.”

I still wish to have
the soles of my legs free

of leather, or cover,
of whatever the magazines
say it need be,

I am still the little girl
running away, though clumsy.

Well, distance cannot,
will not erase identity.

When can I go home?

—

04.02.2020
©2020 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photo via Catrin Welz-Stein

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

—

For NaPoWriMo 2020: Day Two .