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Hopscotch
Throw the rock. Don't hit the lines. Jump in the squares. Pick up the rock. Bop on home. Simple rules. Simple sounds. Taking turns. Being careful. It is a girls' game, this circumscribed world of squares with numbers and an oval called heaven at the top, a space called home at the bottom. We gather on the sidewalk, use our chalk—we make this game, Beverly, Patsy, Linda, me. We play. Someone reaches heaven and hops back home, picks up the rock while balancing on one foot. No one thinks of hell.
Elizabeth Oakes is a professor and graduate advisor in the English Department at Western Kentucky University, where she teaches Shakespeare and American women poets. Recent publications in poetry include Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The Louisville Review, and The Other Side. She was awarded the Betty Gabehart Prize in Poetry at the 2004 meeting of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference at the University of Kentucky. She is the cofounder and coeditor of the Kentucky Feminist Writers Series, now in its third volume. For her forthcoming collection, The Farmgirl Poems, she was awarded the Pearl Poetry Prize.
