"My Mother Was a Billboard" by Taylor Katz

My mother was a billboard and my fatherclimbed her. My mother smiledon the billboard as if spooning her firstkiwi knifed in half. In St. Louis, Missouri,humidity dresses itself in the dragof darkness but it's still man underneath,still growing hair. My father climbedmy mother's billboard on the highway,her hair in the photo curled with an ironhot enough to burn, though it left her curlssoft and fit to coil around a rolling pin.There are photos of my father, the smallesthe's ever been, climbing the poles that heldher suspended. They were marriedin a greenhouse in June with pigsin a blanket on silver trays. My mother'shair was curled like in the movies oron the billboard, whose caption read,“We got the house!” in a font taller thanmy tallest cousin. When they finally securedthe house, I imagine the two of them spedto the nearest highway and hiked a roadsign skyward and slept there until tinypeople named my name and my sister'swoke them with an index finger to the ribs.Taylor Katz lives on 30 acres in Vermont and acts as Assistant Editor at Cooper Dillon, a poetry press out of San Diego. She completed her MFA in poetry at San Diego State University.