She tells again how we’d put on
Sunday school clothes and walk into town, crossing
railroad tracks that stitched a black seam
next to the sawmill. The Emporium opened
double-glass doors like a party invitation to a world
gleaming with polished counters
and faux crystal chandeliers. Cash registers zinging.
Swanky, she’d say. Duck and duckling,
we glided among aisles of books, toys,
watches and wallets; lingered at the perfume station
where white-gloved ladies arranged vials,
misted French lavender eau de cologne
on our wrists. For free.
Mannequins looked down from the mezzanine,
fixing plastic gazes as if
they had somewhere better to be. They glowed
in a haloed light, soft as pale-yellow cashmere.
With nothing to spend,
we peered into tableau windows wrapping
around the corner. Our reflections stared back
against a backdrop of bald hills, scarred by clear-cuts.
Behind those hills, a road led away from there.
And like the push-pull of tides feeding stagnant flats,
I wanted to leave, I wanted to stay.
I could tell her that store is long ago gone;
the theater with its grand marquee a Starbucks now.
The sky still lowers its gray mass, same sulfurous smell.
What is memory, anyway, but half-invented truths?
So, I nod yes, yes, when my mother recalls those days,
her pleasure for that place we came from.
Yes, I say. That’s the way it happened.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 5.
Connie Soper divides her time between Portland and Manzanita, Oregon. Her poems have previously been published in Cirque, The Adirondack Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Calyx and elsewhere. Her first full length book of poetry, A Story Interrupted, was published by Airlie Press in 2022.
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