At four, one daughter was twins with her best friend. They stood in the school hallway in matching sweatshirts with three woolly sheep marching across their bony chests. Four wrists poked out of red sleeves�two dark and two pale.
At four, another daughter says, wouldn't it be funny if a family had a black dad and a white mom. That would be weird, she says, in the restaurant where all the families have segregated themselves.
I say, my hair is brown and yours is blond. Is that weird? That�s different, she claims. You have more skin than hair.
Jennifer Pruden Colligan's poetry is included recent issues of Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal, Blue Collar Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Pemmican, and Red Owl Magazine, and is forthcoming in English Journal. She received an honorable mention in the Fifth Annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award (2006). She is completing her master�s degree in Adolescence Education at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. She was a print journalist for 13 years at newspapers in New York and Michigan. She lives and works in Upstate New York.
