Bridget Gage-Dixon

Donald Illich

Jim H. Duncan

Hugh Fulham

Robert Klein Engler

The Best That She Could Do

Just as I did every Christmas Eve for years,
my daughter folds one hand into the other,
bows her head and asks God to send
Santa with a pony.

Because I know that all she'll find
beneath our artificial evergreen
is a small plastic mare, I think of my mother
watching me run, Christmas after Christmas,
to the window, certain I’d find
a Shetland tied to our chain link fence.

My mother always summoned softly,
enticed me with the promise of a Barbie
she was sure Santa had tucked beneath the tree,
and explained again that we had no room
in our small house for horses.

All day she must have felt me leering
as she prepared the pies, stuffed stale bits of bread
into the belly of dead fowl, heard me bray
as I galloped through the living room
on my sister's tricycle.

Tomorrow I'll teach my daughter
to braid the coarse hair of a pink pony,
watch her put her new Barbie on its back,
and understand why every spring
my mother took me to the petting zoo,
pulled sugar cubes from a sandwich bag
and showed me how to arch my palm
to keep my fingers from the old nag’s teeth.

Bridget Gage-Dixon’s poetry has previously appeared in The Cortland Review, The Adirondack Review, 2River View, and Poetrymagazine.com, as well as several others. She received her M.F.A. from Stonecoast/University of Southern Maine. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children.