In Mrs. Kelly’s fifth-grade class:

six firemen

three teachers

four housewives

the first female President

two policemen

an engineer (the kind that drove a train)

twin veterinarians who liked birds

but would specialize in horses

one fashion model

I was the only hippie

I had seen a wedding in a park

The bride wore a black dress:

hundreds of pleats, an embroidered

field of poppies

The groom wore denim

After the vows, the guests

tossed brown rice

I described every detail

of the wedding to my classmates

but didn’t say

the family I imagined

the hippies becoming

a million sunflowers and

three pink babies

would be nothing like mine

One housewife

one daughter

one salesman long gone

—Tina Barry is the author of Mall Flower, poems and short fiction (Big Table Publishing, 2015). Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Drunken Boat, The Best Short Fiction 2016, The American Poetry Journal, Connotation Press, Blue Fifth Notebook, Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women. Tina is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has several Best of the Net nods. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing at Long Island University, Brooklyn in 2014. Tina is a freelance writer, a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn, and a writing tutor at SUNY Ulster. Barry lives in the Hudson Valley. More information can be found at TinaBarryWriter.com.