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Lynn Hoggard
God Told Me Not To
I said to my father,
just home from work,
who’d walked into the kitchen
and told me to pick up
my paper dolls,
lying strewn across the floor.
His reaction to my four-year-old
sass was to lean down, choose
a Betty Grable green lamé gown,
tear it in half, and let the pieces
float to the floor before my eyes.
Falling across dolls and dresses,
I gathered them to me, sobbing,
and carried them away.
A few things remain from that day—
a deep sense of loneliness,
a fierce stubbornness
when God or my gut
spoke to me,
and all of my poems.
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