A Girl Like Me by Amber Rose

A girl standing at about five foot four

Eyes the color of a roasted almond

Small lips reveal a pearly white smile

Her chin hugging a perfectly round face

Brown spiral curls drooping around her head

Her body is not too small, not too big

Dreaming of being a stay at home mom

With a prince to sweep her off of her feet

A cute little white cottage tucked away

Children playing on the tree swing in back

Laughter and happy screams fill the warm air

A big golden lab watches over them play

Hopes to change the world in some kind of way

To positively impact strangers lives

To walk an old lady across the street

Share the importance of education

Make someone smile who’s having bad thoughts

Show her family the love they have shown her

A girl with her whole life ahead of her

Each path brand new can take her anywhere

Getting so passionate about a choice

Then changing my mind again and again

Dazed and confused then all becomes so clear

Over analyzing everything again

So many opportunities unfold

One day this little girl will fall in love

Someday her fragile heart will be broken

Another she’ll cry about how she looks

Family and friends will travel to heaven

But in the end it will make her stronger

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Poem of the Day: Women Like Me

BY WENDY ROSE

making promises they can’t keep.

For you, Grandmother, I said I would pull

each invading burr and thistle from your skin,

cut out the dizzy brittle eucalypt,

take from the ground the dark oily poison–

all to restore you happy and proud,

the whole of you transformed

and bursting into tomorrow.

           But where do I cut first?

Where should I begin to pull?

Should it be the Russian thistle

down the hill where backhoes

have bitten? Or African senecio

or tumbleweed bouncing

above the wind? Or the middle finger

of my right hand? Or my left eye

or the other one? Or a slice

from the small of my back, a slab of fat

from my thigh? I am broken

as much as any native ground,

my roots tap a thousand migrations.

My daughters were never born, I am

as much the invader as the native,

as much the last day of life as the first.

I presumed you to be as bitter as me,

to tremble and rage against alien weight.

Who should blossom? Who should receive pollen?

Who should be rooted, who pruned,

who watered, who picked?

Should I feed the white-faced cattle

who wait for the death train to come

or comb the wild seeds from their tails?

Who should return across the sea

or the Bering Strait or the world before this one

or the Mother Ground? Who should go screaming

to some other planet, burn up or melt

in a distant sun? Who should be healed

and who hurt? Who should dry

under summer’s white sky, who should shrivel

at the first sign of drought? Who should be remembered?

Who should be the sterile chimera of earth and of another place,

alien with a native face,

native with an alien face?