framed innocence
Alexis McDonald
i stare at the photograph in her room –
my mother sits upon her mother’s lap,
gripping a doll in the same white dress;
bright blue eyes
round red cheeks
pinched tight by the fingers of my
great grand mother
who wept, i can’t condone this.
not this young, to her daughter,
made a mother at sixteen.
but as she coos over the baby’s
chubby toes
tiny hands,
my mother locks her adoration
within a gold rose,
wrapping it around her
little pinkie;
just how she would entrap me
three
decades
later.
Lexi McDonald (she/her) is a senior English Literature and Creative Writing double major at Susquehanna University and enjoys reading, writing, teaching, and traveling. Much of her work incorporates vivid sensory imagery with trauma and topics of social justice and feminism, and these are her most rewarding pieces. She plans to go on to graduate school for creative writing and would collect degrees if she could afford it. Instead (or in addition), she intends to challenge young writers to be deliberate about their passions and futures in writing, and encourage them to write until they surprise themselves, and then keep writing.
Issue 15
2022