by George Yatchisin

If my parents were in love it was because the country let them be, asking for families to mushroom suburbia all over the northeast. The busy post-war manufacture of weapons systems bloomed the likes of Curtiss-Wright, calling even self-taught engineers like my dad to help slide-rule an atomic stalemate future. 

Mom’s job was to hold down the home front, raise us kids until we were old enough for Catholic school to take us, figure out the best ways to shake and bake dinners ovened in bags. We required enemies to keep us whole – Communists with their missiles pointed at us from Cuba, Kennedys killing girls by driving them into the drink, sins which were everywhere like abortionists and Democrats. Death is pagan as fuck.

How could anything based on so much distrust not become untenable, no matter how innocent the pre-teens seemed dancing about a maypole at the Church of the Nativity, just a twirl of immaculate white dresses.

George Yatchisin is Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, 2025-2027, and the author of Feast Days (Flutter Press, 2016) and The First Night We Thought the World Would End (Brandenburg Press, 2019). His poems have been published in journals including Antioch Review, Askew, and Zocalo Public Square. He is co-editor of the anthology Rare Feathers: Poems on Birds & Art (Gunpowder Press, 2015), and his poetry appears in anthologies including Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Everyman’s Library, 2019).