Fireball
- Fireball
At eight years old, I dodged the sisters’ eyes:I ate my lunch, then donned a saintly face,walked out the gate, past church and up the risetoward Horn’s Variety, that mythic place.The path was new to me. I walked aloneand genuflected to inspect a sheared-off branch, a mica fleck, a swallow’s bone.I used a stick to write dam hell; then clearedaway the words. Dust pleated in my skirt.I felt a breath unloosen in my chest,expanding, fearless in this wondrous dirtof disobedience, this fresh unrest.The church bells rang. I rose, denied the call.Picked freedom, sin, a red hot Fireball. [End Page 155]
kyle potvin’s chapbook, Sound Travels on Water, won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Tar River Poetry, and the New York Times. She is an advisor to Frost Farm Poetry and helps produce the New Hampshire Poetry Festival. *
