2 Mar 2019: “Heroics” by Julia Alvarez

We keep coming to this part
of the story where we’re sad:
I’ve broken up with my true love
man after man.
You’ve found it.
Once, It was god.
Once, revolution
in the third world.
Now, It’s love.

You’ll survive, our mothers said
when romance was once.
Now they keep tight faces
for our visits home
and tell their friends
all that education
has confused us,
all those poems.

They have, we laugh,
and buy the dreams—
Redbook, House Beautiful,
Mademoiselle & Vogue—
to read our stories in them
and send the clippings home.
Sometimes the bright chase
of ad lovers in a meadow set
sells us to belief again
in that worn plot of love …

Sadly, we turn the page
to right our hearts,
knowing our lives too well
to be the heroines
of our mothers’ stories.
We’re careful with the words
we pick, the loves with no returns
like the ones we wanted.
Aunts to our sisters’ boys,
we bring them squawking rubber monsters,
birthday poems pasted in the growing albums.