by Jessica Freeman

the sunlight bowed down, and the lightning
bugs weren’t yet out. The city lights just on, we threw

our whiffle ball bats in the lush yard, and ran between this
world and that one, taking two steps at a time up to our

steamy back porch where last year a hummingbird had trapped
herself inside a plastic bucket of bleach left outside the door,

her green and purple wings shimmering and bent as she buzzed
inside the soppy solution next to a scrubbed rag made

from dad’s old underwear. On some nights like this one,
when we knew we were driving to the river house in the morning,

mom had us take turns in the bathtub. My brother went in first,
singing The Beatles in his blue bathrobe, a towel swinging from his hand.

A slush of water welled through the pipes, shaking the walls
as it nearly ran over the bathtubs edge. From the couch in the next

room I yelled and told him to shut the faucet off, afraid there wouldn’t
be more of that tepid-ness for me to run through

my mud-caked hair. This night, he emerged, a frightened look
on his face. I rushed around him to get to my Cinderella bath powder.

He said to tell Jesus hi. An instant, his words shrouded the room,
coloring the air, burning it and making everything smell electric.

I knew he believed what he was saying, I knew he was too old
to imagine it, I knew that here was yet another thing

that he knew well that I did not.

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Jessica Freeman has work published in Mississippi Review, The McNeese Review, Third Coast, Foothill Journal, UCity Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has received an Honorable Mention from the Academy of American Poets. She is a former winner of the Joanne Hirschfield Memorial Poetry Prize and a Slattery Arts Award. Currently she teaches poetry at The Women's Center in Carbondale, IL,and English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she is an MFA candidate.