Two Poems by Morrow Dowdle

My Friend Tells Me He’s a Felon

The term comes down from Old French,
its Latin root meaning bile. It makes mine rise
on the spring morning he recounts an old story—
three cops surrounded him at a community pool,
claimed he stole a watch at the local Target.
Cuffed in front of everyone, he was hauled off
in cold, wet trunks. They withheld evidence,
put him in a cell. He shivered until his wife arrived
with that month’s rent—the bail. He says he’s innocent
but took the plea because he didn’t know better.
Now, he needs work but can’t get hired—and here
I thought that full-time father was his calling, not fallout
from a system’s tricks. He’s still the man
I meet for playdates at this park, who brings
frosted flower cookies for the kids and trusts
in me, I who have been untrustworthy in my time,
have broken the law more than once, by luck
or demographic never caught. I hold his secret
like a bright green moth. Next week, we’ll go
camping, we say, sprawling on the mossy bank.
We watch our boys pitch rocks in the creek.

*

Confession

The guy outside the club wearing a dirty priest getup
and patent go-go boots says he likes my clutch,
its red pop against my black dress. Calls it fetch.

We take drags from my cigarette and I tell him
it was once a makeup bag, stolen from my sister
when she went to rehab. He raises an eyebrow,

I explain that we were teens, it was her third try
at sobriety. So I nicked it, plus a flimsy blouse
and necklace, beads the pink of a baby’s lips,

pendant a ceramic hibiscus. And birth control pills—
I mean, she left them. I just downed them for my own
protection. I wanted to make something of myself,

and it sure wasn’t a parent. It wasn’t my fault
she returned pregnant. Her CDs stayed zipped
safe in their case. I never liked Dave Matthews, Oasis,

all those jam bands ripping off the Grateful Dead.
I wasn’t grateful living in that house in her absence.
Without her comparison, I was the bad daughter,

getting all our father’s bad attention.
If I could, I’d give it all back. Pilgrimage
to where she still lives with our mother,

having never quite gotten it together. I’d lay
my plunder at her feet, give her a pedicure,
beg her forgiveness for being callous,

for being a bitch to her when we were little kids.
But we haven’t spoken in twenty years.
It isn’t because of what I took—no.

I can’t tell this priest it’s what our father
stole from us when we didn’t know it.
What we let him get away with once we did.

*

Morrow Dowdle is the author of the chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and the forthcoming chapbook Missing Woman. Their poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Rattle, New York Quarterly, Southeast Review, Stonecoast Review, The Baltimore Review, and ONE ART, among other literary journals. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the 2024 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. They run a performance series which features BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices and are pursuing their creative writing MFA at Spalding University. They live in Durham, NC. Find out more on Instagram @morrowdowdle.