A Poem by Karen Keltz

You click on “La Grande, Oregon Memories”
And someone has posted a bare brown hill
Sporting a few sparse evergreens
And wants identification
So you write the name and click
Because you remember
The gas station below it
Called Five Corners
Where back behind there was
A dancing bear in a cage
And you asked your dad
For five cents to go
For a closer look
And he said no
Because animals should not
Be caged and it was old and mangy
Which is why the circus sold it
To the gas station owner
Hoping to make a buck
5 cents at a time
and he was damned if he would
add to its misery
so you got in the car now full of gas
and your father drove away,
you looking at the bear in the cage
with clusters of people crowded around
eyeballing it, people who had 5 cents
of their own
and you kept looking until
the road rounded
and that good, long look
is why you remember the hill
but when you look at the post again,
five other people identify the hill their way
and you know they are wrong
but memories, huh? And so you
close your iPad, roll over to go to sleep,
and think of how your father
was right.

Karen Keltz has been published in Global Poemic, The North Coast Squid, Poésie, and Verseweavers, among others. She has won awards for poetry, non-fiction, fiction, and screenwriting. Her middle grades novel, Sally Jo Survives Sixth Grade is available on Amazon. A former journalist and educator, she lives in Tillamook, Oregon.