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Good morning!

This penultimate Poetry Friday in National Poetry Month is graciously hosted at The Opposite of Indifference. Please do drop by and wish Tabatha’s middle-grade anthology, IMPERFECT: Poems About Mistakes a Happy Book Birthday on this its release day, and visit The Mistakes Anthology blog.

Tech Boy has a conference, so I’m going to hole up in a hotel for a few days. We’re going to Philadelphia!

I was excited about my first trip to Pennsylvania, but… Timing is EVERYTHING. I was planning, at least part of the time, on grabbing a seat at a coffee shop and people watching, but, maybe not this …lifetime.

I remember being a small child and having one or the other of my parents remind me over and over and over and over about how to conduct myself in a store – don’t touch anything, don’t ask for anything, stay right with me, don’t put your hands in your pockets, stay to the middle of the aisle. I always thought that it was because they thought I was so bad that I would cut up if they didn’t remind me… but later, after watching their interactions – the one lady who followed my mother through the drugstore, the man who appeared at each of the aisle in the hardware store – I understood. Once you’ve been followed through a store, you realize you’re not a customer, you’re a problem… and some of us learn that very young. Today’s tanka touches on the idea of childhood having a different expiration date for majority and minority children.

Keep Your Hands In the Cart
in particular
hardware stores were the worst –
nails, screws, and washers
beckoning with silver gleam
“Don’t you touch NOTHIN’,” says Dad