August 2022
Bio Note: I am a 2017 2017 NJ Council on the Arts poetry fellow and the author of Louder Than Everything You Love (Five Oaks Press). My work has previously appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter and West Branch.
Little Candle in the Coming Rain
When my son stepped on a tiny toad, crushing it to warm ooze, he’s inconsolable, the splay of legs reflecting his prayer hands: God, can’t you bring him back? Restart the heart. Reassemble his spine’s nine vertebrae? My son learned he can kill, but not raise the dead. Years later, three boys will hold him down at summer camp beyond the trees, scratching his neck, forcing him to say, You’re the best, the best, before letting him up into a changed world.
O, we’re entrusted with other lives. We want to believe we’ll always be loved. During the pandemic, I clumsily cut his hair, leaving scalp patches in the buzz cut —his small shoulders rounded in front of me, hands cupping a blue Transformer, making robot sounds under his breath. My son will say he deserved to be jumped, since he na-na-na’d these kids one too many times. He won’t go back to the camp where he should have made friends,
ate hot dogs, cannon balled into the cold pool. He’ll learn he can get back up, red shirt torn—but he wants to know if someone can kill him, like he did the toad. As a mother, I can’t shelter my son from what comes to devour him—sweaty hands around his neck, poison ivy under their nails. But there’s no earthly love that undoes. His body lived in my body, room inside a room. Wilderness in a wilderness.
©2022 Nicole Rollender
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