By Britney Wells
Like snow driven over wide lakes,
your children turn to leave,
one by one, chins high, tall strangers
under awkward flickering:
the cheap fluorescent lights
of the garage.
They toss their belongings into boxes—
socks, shoes, sweaters. They do not remember
what you remember: them
beneath your stretched-thin skin, the rapid
division of their cells, your blossoming
with the very swell of their bodies, with their minds
that now decide to leave,
and your hands,
full like wells in April,
cradling their bobbing heads
above the surface of warm water,
their not-yet-blue blinking eyes
looking up like stars content in their sphere,
raisin-like palms under their sudsy tufts of hair,
those days when the beginnings of them moved
under a pulsing roof of heart and lungs,
their only sky, your burgeoning world.
As they walk away, their steps are
ice cubes down the warm of your back,
the blur of their scramble, a fog.
And with the click of a button, plastic,
garage doors spread wide to deliver them up.
The exhaust of their engines is a stiff wind, but music blaring from
windows in the distance
whispers it is time.
