Dead Wrong

By Rose Dunlap

The lady in church with the curls
Remembers me, Mama, of you.
I love you,
But you are so wrong sometimes.
That wasn’t a sauna
At the hotel.
Don’t you know
What a hot-a-tub looks like?
And don’t tell me
That we are in America,
I know that we are in Rhode Island.
And I know best.

Rose Dunlap is five years old. She and her mother Justine (who is hardly ever wrong) spent Easter with her grandmother in North Carolina.