Evangelina (Not A Poem!) Poem by Katlyn McGinn

Competing is an art, an art most girls have perfected to a tee. This girl, the one with the long honey and white-blond hair down to her derriere and the wide, sparkling blue-silver eyes, had a slightly flawed work ethic but could compete with the best of them at anything from flying to singing to swimming to running to fighting. Her skill and fine-tuned talents took years and years of dedication and practice and her earlier years literally living in a dog crate like some animal, but she’d broken free of that place and here she was, with a son and family and friends in these peaceful Bastogne plains of tall grasses and swaying night lilies, their fragrance richly filling the air. Her mind wandered now, her stunning eyes focused over the tops of the distant trees, to her victorious flight from that place where she’d been born and raised, in that dank dog crate, how her wings had been bound to her back save for when she was being poked and prodded or chased and beaten. Evangelina extended these limbs now, the cream and tan-streaked wings fanning out to their full span – thirteen feet across, fourteen when she stretched them like she did now; they ached from the memories that she skimmed through.