
Chicopee Two Boys
Wet leaves rust the ground three days after Christmas. Too warm. So who can say why they went out onto the ice, except that they are / were boys. So easy to forget about the current below until it’s unraveling around you. They find one, fly him to Boston, but he dies the next day. We wait to hear about the second, in front of TVs, phones, news tickers streaming across the bottoms of screens. I search “Chicopee two boys” over and over, drag my thumb, refresh, hear myself tell you that I am late. And so we wait. In and out of the bathroom, each time wondering what I’ll find, whether my body is up to something. This place has a history of losing children to snow and ice. The hole in the frozen river, cracking, falling away, expanding. The space between my hips widening like a galaxy. Motherhood, drifting down the river and maybe, if we’re lucky, clinging to the reeds.
2 replies on “Chicopee Two Boys”
Also from Western Mass so this hit powerfully. Beautifully written in its economy. Parenting and loss go together too often.
Beautiful. Holds so much.