Suzanne O’Connell
It was a fine Sunday morning
when I felt the first sign.
We were not the pancake-and-funny-papers
type family.
Mom wasn’t doing the crossword.
Dad wasn’t refilling the coffee cups.
No one taking turns reading Krazy Kat out loud.
Instead, there were three kids fighting
over the small boxes of cereal from
the bargain pack of 12.
Everyone wanted the Frosted Flakes,
no one wanted Raisin Bran.
Sometimes I felt like the Raisin Bran.
Dad was getting dressed for golf.
He would be gone all day.
Mom was still in bed with another headache.
The sound of crunching cereal shook something loose.
I remembered autumn leaves underfoot,
me walking to school,
each leaf seeming so defeated and sad.
Walking, I would’ve been daydreaming about my usual reveries:
quicksand,
whales,
electrocution,
arithmetic,
my tonsils,
the tragedy of apples.
While thinking about the autumn leaves,
a stirring began in my stomach,
magma churning,
red rocks glowing with heat,
a volcano in the making.
A spanking-new thought occurred to me:
I realized I had clarity about nothing,
that my job as a seven-year-old was
to define who I was and what I wanted.
Breathing stopped. Arguing fell away.
I stumbled with the gravity of this explosion,
and almost fell down on the kitchen linoleum.
Suzanne O’Connell’s recently published work can be found in Brushfire, Delmarva Review, El Portal, Good Works Review, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Midwest Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Opiate, Pine Hills Review, Silver Birch Press,Tulsa Review, Visitant Lit, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and others. She was awarded second place in the 2019 Poetry Super Highway poetry contest. O’Connell was also nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and received Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, 2019. Her poem “The Viewing” was included in the Finishing Line Press anthology Covid, Isolation & Hope: Artists Respond to the Pandemic. Her two poetry collections, A Prayer For Torn Stockings and What Luck, were published by Garden Oak Press.