And Then After You Got the Vaccine you didn’t want to limp, even though your old lady knee makes that happen sometimes and the hall to the door outside felt long. Your knee didn’t hurt before you spent a year inside—exercising, yes, but with bands and balls and a prescription. You’d actually feared the men hiking past you at the lake, their unmasked nostrils suddenly obscene. The hall felt long and it was still daylight but barely when you pushed the door at the end of it open, your fingers cold with alcohol and reeking of New York State Clean from the gallon jug with its plunger applicator, a scent like a cheap head shop. Then the many white Art Deco steps of the Westchester County Center. A harmless man in a wheelchair on the sidewalk: masked, your age. The chipped paint on the iron railing. You were a little girl in this place once. At last, turning the corner as if it were all nothing, your husband, eyes brightening as he finds you. His long stride you’ll have to hurry to match—but his eyes. This thing won’t kill you, now. Rush hour. The ride home. · · · Five Hundred Thousand People I keep thinking about cotton candy: a Marie Antoinette bouffant, toy lipstick colored, on a paper cone. How it seemed impossibly huge, how it dissolved into nothing when I tried to eat it. Wet grass under our plaid blanket in the mosquito-bite twilight of a brass band concert. I was six maybe, standing on my father’s sneakers so he could teach me how to jitterbug. My mother said he always stepped on her toes when they danced, but wasn’t I stepping on his? On purpose? I didn’t understand. My mouth lost in a cloud of sugar, my face sticky. Other kids with balloons, balloons let go into stars and darkness. One hand in my father’s, trying to keep my balance. My mother laughed but seemed sad about something. Suppose everything I’ve written until today had dissolved into nothing. Everything. Five hundred thousand people. I’m dancing on all of their shoes, trying to keep my balance. I still don’t understand: all that sweet twilight gone, all that lost music. Mothers, fathers. Other kids. Balloons let go into stars and darkness. · · · But No One Did Afternoon rests fitfully over us, tossing off the clouds’ thick blankets, marking the dormant grass with sudden shadows—our chimney, a tangle of empty branches— then drowsing into near-twilight. Dull, dull, a comfort, this pause, this slumping into what? Peace, maybe? Nothing pending. No one breaking glass, no one cursing. The creek’s still energetic with last night’s rain. The whistle of a freight a mile off, traffic on the road outside just now flicking on headlights. All week watching interviews on TV, I worried about people who spoke in their living rooms in front of bright windows. Because anyone could…but no one did. As if my worry could save all of us. Maybe tomorrow will be normal— coffee and a buttered roll. Normal like a hot shower, a blue sky free of razor wire, memory’s easy breath.
—Submitted on 03/13/2021
Christine Potter is the author of the poetry collection Unforgetting (Kelsay Books, 2018) and the time-traveling young adult series, The Bean Books (Evernight Teen). Her poetry has appeared in the anthology Show Us Your Papers (Main Street Rag, 2020), and in the journals Rattle, Eclectica, Mobius, Sweet, and been featured on ABC Radio News. Potter lives in the lower Hudson River Valley.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
