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Lucky

 Posting for WordCrafters on this lovely Wednesday afternoon.



Lucky

I'll tell my children I was bitten:
Feral leprechauns were rampant in our backyard;
they slipped aboard a freighter and ran wild in Houston,
where a hotel was named for the one who lost his gold.

These acid green lines curling around my ankle,
the brass shamrocks on a chain I borrowed
from my mother for that one high school trip
where everyone assumed math nerds don't: these are mine.

Great Aunt Mirabillis sutured wild flowers in her hair;
it was never the same afterward, wilder and tangled.
She went away with the fairies one summer
and left her photo with the wrong side of the family.

That side is all fairy, so the leprechauns,
of course, come straight for our blood, like mosquitos.
I'll tell my children all of this, wrong-side or not,
fairy-led or fried chicken polite, false or true:

If they only follow my picture home.

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