Graduating with a torn map to the life we should want...but don't

Lines

                                                                                                           By Lori Polachek

Cutting one’s own offspring’s

umbilical cord is a challenge,

even for someone as powerful

as the Almighty.

Three to six years of study are required

to notarize a deed of sale or audit

debits and credits. I couldn’t find

a college with even a one-year Major

in Motherhood.

Being a middle child, I settled
for Commerce-ever determined

to close in on my brother’s two-year

head start in life.

He wasn’t threatened by me,
any more than Coke is by Pepsi.

That’s how it is when you’re “the real thing”-

Too busy selling bottles, and cans-

to worry about taste tests.

Pepsi could learn a thing or two.

We all could.

Freedom is the smelly, rotten

cheese promised in grade school

for jumping through mind-numbing

Pavlovian hoops, meant to remold

God’s image.

I chased curiosity like string
on a ball of yarn, stretching
across restricted lines. Nobody noticed,
as long as I towed the line- which I could not 

always do.

Jokes flew off my tongue-

like a skunk’s spray. There was no
medication back then, to level
competition for students
attention.

Freedom is the black hole

we step into upon liberation

from childhood- armed with a torn map

to the life we should want,
but don’t.

Determined to be selected, naturally

I peed on sticks with abandon,

like I had forgotten how
babies are made-

I embraced each faint pair of lines

in the bosom of its own 
possibility.