Photo: Greg Rosenke

Dear America

Cornflower mornings when I danced
on purple mountains.

Your majestic flag, its stair of stripes
and stuck stars.

Now passed forty, my child is a lucky
seven

and I look for you
in sunsets.

At her Saturday tennis lessons,
the court parents

talk of teams. No one wears
a black uniform.

I stand on the same side of mothering
but live under an empty sky.

A woman tells me in the spring
when the rain comes

her children will pick blueberries
in a wild field.

.

.
Natalie Marino is a poet and physician. Her work appears in Bitter Oleander, Isele Magazine, Leon Literary Review, Rust and Moth, Shelia-Na-Gig online, The Shore, Variant Literature, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Memories of Stars, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (June 2023). She lives in California.