Maryann Corbett

Look up: blazing chrysanthemums in rose shriek into bloom above the Tilt-a-Whirls, hang for a blink, then die in smoky swirls. They scream revolt at what the body knows: all revels end. We clap and sigh. Then, no— another rose! another peony! break, flame, roar, as though by roaring they might make the rides whirl in perpetuum. As though we need not finally, wearily turn, to plow back through the crush of bodies, the lank air, to buses that inch us, sweating, across town. As though we were not dropped in silence there to trudge the last blocks home, the streetlamps low, the crickets counting summer's seconds down.

You find it when you’re tearing up your life, trying to make some sense of the old messes, moving dressers, peering under beds. Almost lost in cat hair and in cobwebs, in dust you vaguely know was once your skin, it shows up, isolated, fragmentary. A tidy little solid. Tractable. Knobbed to be fitted in a lock-step pattern with others. Plastic: red or blue or yellow. Out of the dark, undamaged, there it is, as bright and primary colored and foursquare as the family with two parents and two children who moved in twenty years ago in a dream. It makes no allowances, concedes no failures, admits no knowledge of a little girl who glared through tears, rubbing her slapped cheek. Rigidity is its essential trait. Likely as not, you leave it where it was.