Maryfrances Wagner
Running Out of Choices
The summer we rode the merry-go-round,
my hair flying behind me, yours now covered
in silk scarves, we promised to keep riding
every Saturday, each time choosing a different
horse. We promised to keep taking swim classes,
to finish sewing buttons on our treasure bags
and adding inside some of our favorite things
we'd found on Little Blue Trail. In winter, we
sipped cocoa, your head now snug under a woolen
cap. We counted out four sugar cookies each
that we had rolled and cut into bells and stars
the day before. You won game after game of Chinese
Checkers, each win gaining you another cookie
but not another year. By December, the rocking
horse ornament I bought you for Christmas hung
on my tree by the star you gave me the year before.
Bio
Maryfrances Wagner's newest books are The Immigrants' New Camera, and Solving for X. She co-edits I-70 Review, serves on The Writers Place board, was 2020 Missouri Individual Artist of the Year, and was Missouri's 6th Poet Laureate 2021-2023. Red Silk won the Thorpe Menn book award and was first runner up in the Eric Hoffer award 2024 (reissued in 2023) and Short Listed for the Grand Prize. Poems have appeared in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry East, Voices in Italian Americana, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Penguin), Literature Across Cultures (Pearson/Longman), et. al.