D______ was glamorous, P____ was silly
and one was my mother,
who hovered between
D’s edginess and
P’s harmlessness.

But, she was still
the one
who spent a year
at a school
for wayward girls.

I was in my teens
and not on any troublemaking path
when she told me the story of her youth.

She had been truant one day
past the limit,
and even though she hadn’t done anything
that she was caught for, a marked vehicle
was waiting for her
when she got home
that night.

My mother cried and begged
my grandmother, a stoic woman
from rural Missouri,
who told her
she had to follow the guards
if she wanted to ever be allowed
to come home.

Only a year or two
after she was released,
my mother, after graduation,
found a part-time job
at a photography lab;
it was during this time,
she began dating my father.

She probably thought, as
did he,
she’d be his golden bird
before she later grasped
there’s nothing golden
in containment.
Even if it was of her own volition.