By Peter Mladinic
PROMPT — The way I see it ...
You always heard of Girl Scout cookies,
some of you might have even sold some,
some of you ladies, even some of you
brothers of sisters who now live in nursing
homes or in framed photo memories maybe
saying silently, on line indoors at the bank,
waiting to approach the counter behind
which stands not a robot but a young man
or a young woman counting bills, and you,
on line thinking: this was my sister Rochelle
with whom I went door to door selling cookies
in cellophane-wrapped boxes, she was my
sister, she is my sister, she was a Girl Scout.
Your youngest sibling, whose brown eyes
you see and speak to before finally it’s your
turn to approach the teller to take out $1000
for the carpenter for a tiled wall in a home
your Rochelle dwells in, in photos only.
Her eyes light brown, like the gingerbread
cookies hung on a Christmas tree,
gingerbread cutouts, the gingerbread man,
gingerbread woman, maybe Barbie and Ken
you could call them, Rochelle’s eyes suggest
from the framed photo on the shelf at home.
And for some reason you think of a girl
playing with a Barbie doll on a rez outside
Shiprock, New Mexico, a girl maybe five
in the shadow of a door with loose hinges,
and no doorbell to ring and inside a fan
whorls on a floor, far from your central air.
She is Amanda, tidying ruffles of Barbie’s
dress, and there’s no Ken doll, but if there
were maybe he’d be wearing a badge, your
late sister Rochelle’s eyes suggest. And
suggest you bake Boy Scout cookies, and
package them because someone has to.
“I’m selling cookies for the Boy Scouts,”
you say, thinking, because my sister’s eyes in
the photo suggested this is where I should be,
at the door of your house with central air,
with this box in hand, exchanging it for bills,
saying to the man at the door, who is Ken,
an ex-navy lifer, “It’s for the Boy Scouts,”
none of which will be fondled in a dark tent
by a scout leader, a scout master, at a camp
in woods deep in Arkansas, far from Shiprock
and you and me, Ken, whose doorbell I rang,
whose door I’ve lingered in long enough
to hear my sister’s eyes speak your name.
Peter Mladinic was born and raised in New Jersey. His most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.
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