In the works

This is just something I am working on for my poetry class. We were told to write a prose poem and although I am somewhat unfamiliar with the form, I was intrigued by the change in format. Here is what I came up with:

Angels Can’t Bowl

She was a daddy’s girl but never knew it because at three her daddy turned into an angel and at three, children don’t quite understand angels. They are more concerned with Sesame Street and the Zoo. She looks at me with the eyes I gave her, round as blueberries and as deep as sometimes I felt the hole that lives inside me. I try to explain. Angles are like Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. Her blue eyes get bigger and she seems to understand. In Kindergarten, she comes home with a drawing of Steven: a stick figure with a Santa hat and an Easter basket. I tear up in the carpool lane and when we get home, I put the picture on our fridge. In first grade, my brother goes to Daddy Bowling Night and holds her hand in the concession line. She says she was okay with him coming instead of her dad because she knows angels can’t bowl. In second grade, I go to kiss my sweet girl goodnight and find her under the covers of her bed, fragile limbs squeezing the life out of her stuffed polar bear. I put her in my lap and stroked her hair and make “shhhhh’ing” noises. She says a boy from her class told her Santa wasn’t real, and if Santa wasn’t real, were angels? She asked him, and he laughed and called her a baby for believing in those kinds of things. So if angels weren’t real then that meant her daddy wasn’t an angel, he was just dead. And the breath washes out of me in one quick swoop and I cling to the tattered edge of her blanket and stare into the eyes we share. I haven’t gotten to the chapter in my parenting book that explains how handle this moment. So I just hold her and rock back and forth and after a while when we both stop crying and I think she is asleep, I find my voice. “You were such a daddy’s girl.”