Word Search

By Deborrah Corr

PROMPT — What is Love?

The word couldn’t be found in the house.

Maybe it hid between glass jars

of peaches on the pantry shelf. Or stuck

itself like a wad of gum under the table.

I knew it was there somewhere,

after it scrambled out from a stack

of letters tied with ribbon and tucked

into an old trunk, opened by us

kids with peanut butter fingers.

I think of you all day, my love.

That word sprang up and smacked our faces.

Stunned us to silence. The L-word

written in our mother’s own hand.

A word that never slipped the lips

of anyone in the house. Especially

our parents, jaws clenched with grudge.

But now it was out and hiding like

a tiny mouse escaped from a cage,

quivering, in fear of being stomped.

And all my life I would try to find it.

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Deborrah Corr is the author of the chapbook Naked Rib (Finishing Line Press). A retired kindergarten teacher, she decided to have more fun creating lines of poetry. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Chicago Quarterly Review, Verse Daily, Booth, McNeese Review, Catamaran, and many others. Deborrah writes from Seattle, WA.