Starting Over
A poem by Tricia McCallum

Starting Over

I would replace the finger you lost on your right hand
working in munitions during the war.
You always hid away that hand.

Gone would be a troubled older brother 
sneaking into your room at night
and his oblivious mother.

There’d be school past the age of nine,
where you’d learn
to trust your voice, 
question authority,
emerging a woman no longer destined 
to defer, scrape,
bow.

Let’s start over.
Here’s a fighting chance.
Hell, Mom.
Here’s a head start.

About the Author:

Tricia McCallum is a Glasgow-born Canadian, a Huffington Post Blogger, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and Best of the Net winner. She has two poetry collections in print: The Music of Leaving (Demeter Press 2014) and Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Mother and Father Remembered (2011). She publishes her prose and poetry online and wherever she can find good homes, blogging about women’s rights, mental health, wretched jobs she’s had (and they are legion), and even more wretched blind dates (also legion).

She writes about almost anything: falcons in Ireland, elephants being traipsed through the Queen’s Midtown Tunnel, stray island dogs, beleaguered mothers, small town beauty queens, and ill-mannered neurosurgeons. Underlying it all is her curiosity about how people navigate their lives and what it is they struggle with under the surface.

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