Popsicle Sticks
The season of failures started with my birthday: a sleepover where no one slept, where none arrived—local parents too nervous to send their precious to party or prance about with the little girl with brown skin and buck teeth—without a mother living in an abandoned gymnasium turned apartment. We moved on to other events: Failure to overcome homesickness, Failure to catch the bus, Failure to axe a chicken, Failure in French, Failure to endure Winterlude without wetting snow pants. A laughing stock, I took to drowning my sorrow in sucking popsicles. Grape was my favourite, but I’d condescend to chocolate, banana, strawberry, whatever blue was, should no grape be available. And the only one I thought understood my state of mind & predicament was the old bushy dog, Diable, who never managed to learn to stay away from porcupines & had as many needles lanced through his face as I had popsicle sticks in my pockets. And one day we heard, Chamois, the husky with a diva’s white coat, was pregnant & Diable the father. Even at that age, I couldn’t understand how a being as shimmering as Chamois could condescend to doing whatever dogs do to get pregnant with Diable, but so it was. And though Diable was isolated, because he was a walking pin cushion, the rest of the town was trembling with excitement. The children collected. Imagine: to eat popsicles!
To read this poem, look for Priscila Uppal’s collection, Winter Sport: Poems, forthcoming from Mansfield Press.
