Jeopardy
- Jeopardy
How little it takes to break a heart: In my Winn-Dixie cart, I had the new Fudge Brownie flavor of Healthy Choice Low Fat Premium Ice Cream; I had Almaden, Bounty, Canada Dry, Charmin Plus: I had Coffee-mate and Glade Plug In— no more than I needed for the express line, fast-walking past a woman haranguing her four to stay put at the end of the aisle— a lovely group portrait of elder daughter and son, two smaller boys, all brightly neat and starched, the Black family we’d all like to see, who seemed there must be a father for. She harried herself back to the shelf for the bypassed peanut butter, proudly assuring them that one more would drive her crazy. But I wasn’t walking fast enough and heard the slap of fingers on knuckles breaking them apart, and “Little boys don’t hold hands!”
I lurched to a stop and turned in time to see the brothers four and six side by side in each other’s ruin looking up in perfect trust at their mother.
Indecisive and cowardly, I let her get away.
Gerald Barrax was Professor of English, Poet-in-Residence, and Editor of Obsidian at North Carolina State University at Raleigh. He is author of four volumes of poems, Another Kind of Rain, An Audience of One, The Deaths of Animals and Lesser Gods, and Leaning Against the Sun. In July, 1997, From a Person Sitting in Darkness: Selected and New Poems, his fifth volume, was published by the Louisiana State University Press. He has recently retired to West Chester, Pennsylvania.
