O:JA&L Poetry: All forms & styles
Laura Sweeney
SELF PORTRAIT AS LATCHKEY GIRL
Morning and mom and dad aren’t home.
Latchkey girl makes cinnamon toast
for herself and her sister.
Both too skinny.
After helping her sis out the door and
on her way towards Sunset Heights
Latchkey Girl walks to high school.
Nevermind the Iowa weather.
Around 3:30pm she returns
to watch TV the one with rabbit ears
next to the piano in the family room
where she practices and sings.
The voice lessons she pays out of
her own paycheck earned at Spurgeon’s
clothing store, evening
and weekend shifts.
And she really doesn’t question
time without family though she sits
in the rocker where her father reclined
smoking a pipe.
She reclines on the couch where she
cuddled Soot, her black dachshund
next to the windows that overlook
her sandbox swingset playhouse
and mom’s barren vegetable garden.
She doesn’t dust those blinds or mind
the drafty walls made from
knotted pine while she watches
Alice or Lavern and Shirley. And as the day
turns into evening Knots Landing. She
doesn’t care who shot JR since the shows
she likes are Kate and Allie, One Day At a Time,
Designing Women, kids growing up in single
female headed households. While her mother
drives 40 miles to journalism school
and her father sips Irish whiskey the next town over
her eyes are on the blonde bombshell ad exec
and her baseball playing housekeeper
as they vie for Who’s the Boss. And yes she watches
Saturday morning cartoons, School House Rock but
it’s Wonder Woman who inspires as she
twirls and twists the dish towel used
to swat her sister.
About the writer:
Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in Iowa and Illinois. She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist’s Conference in Oslo, Norway. Her poems and prose appear in seventy plus journals and twenty-five anthologies in the States, Canada, Britain, Indonesia, and China. Her recent awards include a scholarship to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. She is a PhD candidate in English Studies/Creative Writing at Illinois State University.
Image: After School Special (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2025. Public domain via MidJournaey AI.
Other work by Laura Sweeney available at O:JA&L:
Poetry: All forms & styles|Americana||Laura Sweeney|”WHERE I FIND SOPHIA THE FEMININE FACE OF GOD”
Poetry: All forms & styles|Americana||Laura Sweeney|”AT THE SANTA MARIA WINERY”
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The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Brian Clements on Prose Poetry
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The Buttonhook Press Master Series: Roberta Allen on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
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With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Maxine Chernoff on Prose Poetry
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The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Tom Hazuka on Flash Fiction
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