Grand jeté sweep to the pole, she moves like a Balanchine girl. I imagine her with me at the Butler Street Y, where I once rehearsed despite heat on sticky basketball floors. Cheap rubber shoes marked legs and hands as we jazz rolled on the boards. We ran piece after piece until tall boys, leaning and leering, balls to palms, displaced us with gym echo shouts not unlike […]
Give me, today, a moment to hug him goodbye. Let me rub my cheek against his face, feel his body slacken. A moment to frame the freckle farm at his temple, dark cowlick, thin ridge of his shoulders. Hold our child tight for ten days, buckle his seatbelt, keep his bedtime, sit on the floor to play. Bring him back older but the same as before. Jennifer Dracos-Tice […]
Grip your plastic mini-bin of tic tacs—all yours— as she finishes class down the hall. Avoid eye contact with the snack bar clerk up front, shrink into the corner behind your coloring. Disappear in the nurses’ lounge hours past shift change, the attending complains about employee kids. Move your vigil to the waiting room, grab a seat that creaks and rocks six others. No one’s dying, you all can wait. […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 