Surprise City

Our mothers never let us run the streets barefoot,

hypodermic needles discarded like bubblegum wrappers,

so we laced our sneaks up tight, ran into a time

when at last the streets in the neighborhood

are newly paved.

Christine Taylor, a multiracial English teacher and librarian, resides in her hometown Plainfield, New Jersey. She serves as a reader and contributing editor at OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters. Her work appears in Modern Haiku, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Menacing Hedge, and The Paterson Literary Review among others. She can be found at www.christinetayloronline.com