the doe’s motel 

twelve is that awkward age in the best
of times, sweaty, smelly prepubescence with a touch 
of self-consciousness, breast nubs, and pimples,
no matter where home happens to be, in
a tidy cul de sac with a mailbox at the end of a paved 
driveway, edged by a meticulously coifed lawn 
with a lavender phlox border or at the Doe’s Motel 
on Route 45 in Libertyville, home to a family 
of eight kids who shared three rooms, the oldest
boy, a paraplegic who could swim like a fish in 
the kidney-shaped swimming pool and us, 
my dad, mom, sister and me, third kitchenette 
unit from the end, the only room with a colored 
TV, bought by my dad, with special permission from
the reservation office, to make it feel more like home…
normal is just a setting on a washing machine

I don’t know why it pops into my head all 
these years later, I don’t need remembering 
now with a steady roof, a proper address, a mailbox, cupboards 
always stocked, categorized, alphabetically, in tidy, unsettling rows, labels facing out, and 
a mortgage paid on time, the first bill paid 
every month year after decades before 
groceries, before anything, with a steady 
9 to 5, give or take, to sustain it all,
I’ve come a long way from the Doe’s Motel…I have…

imagine my surprise to discover it still 
stands, an RV stop these days, reminding 
me how fragile life is for survivors…
that kidney-shaped pool is paved over 
now, but the ghosts of us swimming 
like fishes that summer of 1968…
I remember us swimming all too well

~kat

Na/GloWriPoMo 2026 Day 2 prompt: write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

Time for a glimmer…in the midst of a deluge of storms yesterday afternoon well into the night we had a brief glimmer of sky and the setting sun at dusk. Proof that even in the midst of a storm…there are glimmers to be found!

Much love, peace, and glimmers in the storm to you!

~kat ✨✨✨💚✨✨✨