Our mother was a mousetrap under the stairs.
She used as bait the things she never said.
We’d hear a snap and find three silver hairs
in an old passport, pinned like something dead.

Our father was an occupying force
in a town of collaborators. Good
behavior meant not signaling in morse
enemy troops camped in a distant wood.

Our parents paced—her mind a radio
playing the classic dirges until dawn,
his heart a spider web spun in the snow
catching the dusk sun before it was gone.

For supper, they would feed us each a crumb
of moonlight. Our house was a moving train.
Evenings they danced in a delirium
of silence, drunk on a thimbleful of rain.

*****

Morri Creech writes: “I don’t really have comments for this poem. The first line came to me, and the rest of the poem found its way as I continued to search for context to support that sentence. I didn’t know what I was going to say until I was saying it.”

‘An Ordinary Childhood’ was the 2025 Rattle Poetry Prize Winner

Morri Creech is the author of five collections of poetry: Paper Cathedrals (Kent State U P, 2001), which received the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize; Field Knowledge (Waywiser, 2006), which received the Anthony Hecht Poetry prize and was nominated for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Poet’s Prize; The Sleep of Reason (Waywiser, March 2013), a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize; Blue Rooms (Waywiser, October 2018); and, most recently, The Sentence (LSUP, September 2023). A recipient of NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships, as well as grants from the North Carolina and Louisiana Arts councils, he is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte, where he teaches courses in both the undergraduate creative writing program and in the low residency M.F.A. program. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with the novelist Sarah Creech.

“Chocolate Ice Cream Temptation” by h.koppdelaney is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.