Poetry By Christine Tierney

      Ron Gilbert CC



mum said it was hard living with a girl who hid from the dazzle

she wasn’t wrong. 

she said, you are the dark, and everyone knows it. and they did. 

she said, all the bright clothes, holly hobby barrettes won’t save you, either.

what’s left in the dark becomes the dark. how can it not?    

it wasn’t my fault. it wasn’t her fault either. she sat me down on a far too bitty blue rocking chair, peeling and splintered. rock, she said, and if you need me, you’re gunna have to find your way to the party of dazzle.

i never went looking.

but i heard from a cousin or a strand of silly string there was line dancing at the party of dazzle, and i knew i’d twist my podgy ankle trying to keep up. mum led them. snapped her bubbly fingers to the “hustle,” her foxy, coffee-brown polyester bellbottoms exuberant.     

she said, just try. just try. put on that adorable sundress i made you for nona’s cookout. 

i told her it didn’t fit, even though it did. i told her it was too cold for a sundress, even though it wasn’t. i told her i loved those spaghetti straps, when the thought of baring my flabbo upper arms made me woozy. she said, i think you’re afraid of your own skin. she was right. 

you know, she said, i spent more than i should of on the pattern for that dress. and she did. she really did. 

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​Christine Tierney is a poet, flash fiction writer, digital collage photo artist, certified life coach, and wannabe comedian. Her  first book, chicken+lowercase=fleur was published in 2021 by Lily Poetry Review Books, and her work has appeared in Permafrost, Fourteen Hills, Poet Lore, Trampoline, The Gravity of the Thing, Sugar House Review, and other fab places.