Little Boy Blue

 

Magic cards, arranged by powers, and dice
transport you and anyone else who joined
your narratives over the moat, through castles,
and past ghouls who were far less frightening

than the father who offered to teach you
to fly off the roof of his SRO
apartment building on Lombard Street.
Visitation rights, or the visitation

of demons. The Sundays ended soon after
the flying lesson, but the cards and their gates
into the world of brass powers persisted
filling your world. Once, you hated standing

still for the portrait with the combed hair, the tie.
Now that’s all you have left of a childhood.

***

Carol Dorf’s poetry has been published in  “Slipstream,” “Glint,” “The Mom Egg,” “Spillway,” “Sin Fronteras,” “Antiphon,” “Composite,” “About Place,” “The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics,” “Scientific American,” “Maintenant,” “OVS” “Best of Indie Lit New England,” and elsewhere. She is poetry editor of Talking Writing and teaches mathematics at Berkeley High School.