A poetic response to the “Transformation” prompt:
The Secret Keepers
It turns out we were a family built on secrets. Aunt Lucille
didn’t want to raise Frankie. She didn’t have time
to hold him tight and read him story books before bed.
She wouldn’t give him up for adoption either.
What sense of not letting go was she attached to?
(This is my aunt’s secret.)
He and another boy ran away from Boys’ Town, or so his file reads.
But I think it was really more just a road trip— that they always figured
to come back after a weekend in New York City after finding Aunt Frances
(my mother) hoping to be invited over for a family dinner
of whipped potatoes and pot roast. The boys longed for the sounds
of familial laughter. Frankie called her number. Why didn’t they connect?
(This is my mom’s secret.)
When my father lost his job, I was away at college. All semester,
nobody told me. When the neighbors saw him mowing the lawn
on a Tuesday weekday they thought he’d retried early —probably living
on easy street. After losing his job why couldn’t my dad find a new one?
(This is my dad’s secret)
Dad’s job loss became the secret my family eventually all
came to carry. Such a secret twisted our members like bent steel
after a crash when the car’s totaled. Were they trying
to protect me from their cries of desperation?
(This is my family’s secret.)
With everything taken from me, I found a painful beauty.
No backup, no net under the trapeze. I felt like there was
no way out. So here I stood trapped in an escape room,
left to figure out life with a pittance of money, and only a teenager’s
worth of experience. How I successfully made it through?
(This is my secret.)
What helped me a great deal actually was that the prompt said to list “things” and then change the mindset to see at least one of the list items as beautiful.
Instead of a tangible “thing” I went for a “mental” thing— one of the hardest periods of my life which I don’t speak about often or ever write about. Somehow, I could write about it this time using this prompt.
Briefly stated, using questions to move the poem along and not make judgements but only offer queries and then ending with the last stanza using a question almost as white space for the reader to imagine an answer is how I decided to go. My hope is that any reader of this poem will relate to their own time of difficulty and self-reflect and remember how they survived. So I tried to achieve through a narrative poem + blank space where the reader becomes essentially a poet searching for their answers to life and circumstances as they fill in their own blanks.
Annie lives in Prairie Village, Kansas with David, her husband of forty-five years and their sweet blue-eyed Aussiedoodle, Summit. She has taught poetry classes in Kansas City at Turning Point, a network for those with chronic illnesses, as well as After-School Poetry and Chess classes at a nearby K-6 charter school in Kansas City, Missouri. For four years she was the poetry editor for Flapper Press Poetry Café. Her chapbook, Comets, Relationships that Wander, was published in 2022 by Finishing Line Press.
