Wendy BooydeGraaff

Mother

can I curl up beside you, my head on your lap
in the hot summer humidity, you stroking the frizz 

flat away from my forehead, my breath softening
and evening after an early Saturday rising and 

selling at the market which is a place I loved
to wander because the free dark grape juice 

samples across from us and the orange pink
yellow gladiolas beside us and the Mennonite-sewn 

barbie clothes and the peaches we sold alongside black
currants and gooseberries which smell translucent 

and prick your wrists as you pick them just as all good
memories do.

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Wendy BooydeGraaff's short fiction, poems, and essays have been included in The Ilanot Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Slant, Porter House Review and elsewhere. She lives in Michigan.