The girls with clean shoes and Barbies had rules, couldn't sleep out with us, didn't have their lawns spoiled by baseball in summer, football in fall, garden hose flooding for winter skating. The boys didn't seem to notice I was a girl, maybe short hair and bruised knees were camouflage enough, they welted me with dodge balls just the same. I liked their talk, and trouble, learned things I shouldn't know like what happens when you pour water on a gasoline fire, and how it is to have your wind knocked out. Mostly the wind was behind us as we rode our bikes down topsoil cliffs, leaped off swings into space. Like the boys at the pier who taught me to fish for bait from the bucket, calling me Worm Woman with a bit of pride, they raised me, found a place for me when I had no fishing stuff of my own. I want those boys to know that my daughter can change her own oil, and that I am almost never afraid.
Karen Schubert grows flowers in her great-grandmother's garden in northeast Ohio . She's a graduate student in the English department at Youngstown State University and recipient of YSU's Hare Award for poetry. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Mid-America Poetry Review, DMQ, Primavera, Versal, Vision-International, YSU's Penguin Review, and others.
