How to know there will only be a once, an only time;
I stand in the little parking lot with the woman I love and her daughter.
It is impossibly cold. A bottle somewhere rolls fast in the scouring wind.
The five rental houses look down on us as we try and light
the Chinese lantern to celebrate the New Year. If the shuddering flame
goes out that has caught in her daughter’s eyes, I will go out with it.
Her nose is running and she swipes her upper lip with her tongue.
We both hold the lantern, and for a moment, the side singes black,
and a little pain leaps in my chest just as when her mother told me boys
on the balcony pitched beer cans all night and pissed on their car.
The light grows with her daughter’s eyes and I can see the rose pattern
on her snowsuit. She swivels her hooded head to look at me as if to say,
This is working. We feel it lift, then light all three of us as it ascends
into the black ocean of Portland’s night sky. As it clears the last story,
it heaves to the side and I run to the balcony hoping she will chase
after me. I will pass her lit window, which frames her small dresser, dresser
of an eleven-year-old girl, strewn with makeup in hopes of attracting
boys I will never meet. At the next balcony, I can hear her following.
We make it to the top and a full moon bursts bright with
an astral blue arc. It is small now and I do not want it to go out.
There!
It blinks like a star. Heaving, we breathe in the cold drift
of wood smoke, the city lit up below us, happening without us.
Sean Sutherland has had poems published in the literary magazines: the Meadow, Lime Hawk, Gravel, Prick of the Spindle, Blast Furnace, the 30th anniversary anthology; the Writers Studio at 30, and the Maine Review, for which he won honorable mention for their poetry prize in 2015. He was nominated for a Pushcart by the literary magazine Sleet in 2019, and recently had two poems selected in an anthology titled, Poetry for The Actor, A Guide to Deeper Truth.
Sean is a MacDowell Colony Fellow. He self-published a chapbook of short poems and haiku in 2010 entitled, Forever in the City, Forever Arriving, and has had plays of his produced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Maine. He is currently studying with Philip Schultz in his master class at The Writers Studio in New York City, and recently discovered the joys of camping in a tent!
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