Smolder

You send the baby to school that same morning
and it feels right: the wind
breaking around the car.
Proof you are still something
air will yield to.

“When you stop moving the darkness comes,”
someone you loved used to say. And even if you don’t
believe it, you stay in motion just to drown it out.

You hold your son’s hand as he climbs the schoolhouse steps
wearing the neighbor’s clothes, the building still there,
his teachers well slept, like the inside of a barn
first thing in the morning, their eyes trained
on you, measuring by sight the odds you don’t
break in the doorway. Succumb to whatever comes
after shock, there at their feet.

And then you drive yourself not home because it’s gone
but to a little patch of daylight beneath a small tree
where the world is quiet. And as you sit beneath its limbs
you notice the ringing in your ears has dimmed
to something more like chimes, the friction between silks
or fast water through a tin pipe.

And though you still smell like the ribbons of smoke
that have all but killed you,
you amount again and again
to more than you have all your life.

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Sara Potocsny is a writer in Syracuse, NY, where she lives with her son, Sol. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She has one chapbook called The Circle Room, published by Lover Books. She has work in or forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review, Juked, Hobart, Radar, HAD, The Racket, Rejection Letters, and others. You can find her on Twitter at @sarapotocsny and IG at @spotocsny.