Before blacking out
I saw the school bus’s underside,
heard my car’s roof peel
from the door posts,
easy as a sardine can’s lid, much quicker.
I hunched low to the floor as possible,
but Delia didn’t think to.
I couldn’t look,
only thought
how many kids on there?
Blacked.
Todd Mercer won the Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest and took 2nd and 3rd place of the Kent County Dyer-Ives Prizes in 2013. His chapbook Box of Echoes won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest. Mercer’s poetry appears in Thema, Blue Collar Review, and Black Spring Review.