Role Reversal

by Nicole Farmer 

My oldest daughter instructs me on how to behave after my first vaccination.
I consult her when making travel decisions.
She is twenty-six.
I am fifty-eight.
She talks to me in a tone of patient understanding.
I want to tell her what a wild child I was in my twenties.
She expounds on Democracy Now, which we both listen to.
I want her to read Dickens, to laugh.
She tells me to call her back so we can discuss the Middle East.
I promise to read the book she has given me on the nature of relationships.
She dreams of women being raped and being unable to help them.
I dream of jumping so high that my head pops above pink clouds.
Her middle name should be Caution, not Rose.
I have no middle name, but I think I would like Contenta.
She is the virus expert.
I am an aging hippie chick.
Her anger lights the room on fire.
My bare feet wander out the door.

Nicole Farmer is a writer, teacher, and director living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been published in The Bangalore Review, Great Smokies Review, and Sheepshead Review. Her play 50 JOBS was produced in Los Angeles. As a child, she dreamed of running away with the circus to become a trapeze artist but ended but joining a traveling theatre group at age sixteen in Austin, Texas, where she performed new plays one day in Spanish and the next day in English.

The Roadrunner Review nominated “Role Reversal” for The Nina Riggs Poetry Award.