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Prairie Schooner 78.1 (2004) 145-146



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Two Poems

Michelle Bitting


Halloween

We'd almost given up any hope of celebrating.
My son, a carnival of fears and funky rituals
had made it clear - no costumes, no doorbells,
no parading about the dark neighborhood
in white sheets, swelling pumpkin sack
curled in five expectant fingers.
Not the ordinary panic a child might have
of spooky clatter, windows flashing
ghoulish shapes against the late October sky.
No, this boy's dread springs from a remote
and wordless place, beyond understood borders.
His explanation lost in a haze of drowsy synapses,
his silence final and still, left to sway
alone in the lynching breeze.
So when he suddenly announced
the afternoon before
his wakened need to be Tinkerbell,
I ran for the green tights, glittered wings
to circle his two small shoulders.
Out of Tinkertoy, he pushed together a wand.
And when the moment came
to face the night's trickery,
he opened the door and announced
to the decorated crowd drifting by
(as if he'd just risen from a very long sleep),
"Look, the world is dressing up!"
Yes, we answered him, yes,
and you are part of it. [End Page 145]

Giving My Son His Meds the Morning of the Big Meteor Storm

Astronomers predict this year's Leonids meteor display, expected to appear before dawn Sunday, will be a dazzler worth missing a little sleep.
- Joseph B. Verrengia
Associated Press Science Writer
Today, like every other, the crucial practice:
The typed bottle pulled from kitchen shelf.
Plastic syringe plunging deep into thick
orange fluid, I draw the potent stream
to the prescribed mark, and with one thin squirt,
dose a cup of cran-apple juice so he won't
taste anything sinister, won't know his parents
are messing with his head. Amazing, how little
it takes to turn the lights on, to make
the synapses, sleepy dogs, sit up and bark.
This morning as I dispensed the tiny
blitz of chemical that lights up his mind's
shadowed corners, people everywhere stood
in parks, on mountaintops,
wore pajamas on their grassy lawns,
waiting to see a shower of flaming dust
that turned the sky's dark dome
into something rare and spectacular. All those
eyes fixed on bright heavenly bodies.
All those chins lifting up.





Michelle Bitting enjoyed careers as a modern dancer and chef before becoming a mother and poet. Her poetry appears in Rattle, Pearl, and Many Mountains Moving.

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