Prom Approaches

Prom approaches, though still weeks away,

and the girls huddle over computers

and tablets searching dress sites

for styles and costs, purchases, or worse, copies

to be made like the high priced ones they can’t afford,

hoping no one notices the crooked seams stitched

by their mothers days before, embarrassed, ashamed,

the tears shed over a parent’s refusal

to spend “that much” for a single night,

perhaps a mother who forgot the importance of a prom dress,

the status of style and store and a price tag,

or a father who never knew, never cared, his own mother

ordering a tux and flowers and his father

handing over the keys to the family car, freshly

washed and filled with gas to impress his date

and her parents who watch guardedly through the flash

of cameras creating memories to stick in a box,

forgotten in the years ahead and remembered only briefly

in a spring when our daughters huddle over dress sites

and our sons, tongue-tied, stammer to ask for the car,

remembering that one night, crepe-paper streamers

and the dates we left behind after the dance had ended.