A boy with cornflower eyes drops his cotton candy and cries, briefly, before remembering himself, his father, and his father’s fists.
He trashes his spoiled spun sugar, kicks concourse dirt onto a kid’s new candy apple, and feels better by feeling worse.
These are the makings for an all-American story.
You can follow Joree at @joreenovotny.
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You can follow Joree at @joreenovotny.
She has never attached fondness to furniture or fixtures. Her family was poor, but not in knick-knacks. On gray days she takes pleasure in purging her place of its needless things.
Still, she clothes the bruised table from her grandmother’s kitchen, unwilling to nurse the coffees of her twilight elsewhere.
Joree is accumulating experience. Follow her on Twitter at @joreenovotny.
Nose pressed to stone, you say, “I just love watching ants.”
Your cheeks smile and I think into my drink how raising you is heavy but loving you is weightless.
“Where did the ant go?”
Unburdened, you crawl after your question. Already my beer is warm with watching you become.
Joree writes when she can with what she has.
Rutabagas, incandescent. Golden turnips, soft as flesh. Caramelized carrots, parsnips roasted and crisp.
She chooses to remember the vegetables sliced and seasoned by her grandmother’s hands, translucent as Vidalias.
The rest of her roots, she knows, belong mangled in the disposal. Feeble skins and rotting corpses, bitter fennel, putrid beets.
Joree is an anti-poverty advocate who moonlights as a writer when she’s not recovering from putting her toddler to bed.
One day after revealing the lump beneath your gown, you’ll know to say
“Heavy,
thickened,
redness.”
One week after, waiting for results, you’ll know your
life insurance benefit
and the colors of purgatory.
Well-versed in specialists and staging,
you’ll plead
for strength,
more time,
a timely call,
easier sleep.
Grace.
Joree writes what she knows, which isn’t much, but enough for her.
Thirty-four hours and one needle submerged in the spine later, the doctor tells her patient to push.
“Yes! Yes! More! More!” She chants and suctions.
A gurgling cry. “Look at all that hair!”
Kneading at the freshly emptied womb, she pauses.
No.
She steels herself and calls for four units.
Joree writes professionally in her role as director of external affairs for a statewide nonprofit, but her favorite muses are her two-year-old son and her tender memories.