By Patricia Powers

Said my eleven-year-old

While eating her cereal

Le monde va mal

 

Yes ma pauvre

The world is going bad

I tried to hold it off

 

The way the invisible moon holds off the white cloud crash of a wave

The way a cloud holds off the heavy suspended droplets of a downpour

To give you more suspended time

 

Time for jumping rope with flying hair and hearing the thwap thwap on the sidewalk and
testing your foot on a low tree branch before pushing to standing and digging a deep root
out of the dirt and twisting it in your fingers and skinning a shin and peeling off the scab
before it is ready and examining the veins on both sides of a leaf before ripping it in half
and hanging from a jungle gym and sniffing the metal on your palms and buying a cold
wet soda from the corner store with your pal and smelling like the outside because you’ve
been running all day and going home when your mom calls your name from a distance
and getting in a cool sheeted bed with grime under your nails

 

I wished you all of this until you realized the world is going bad

Hold on, hold on

 

Like a black-legged deer tick tucked in the fold behind your knee

Like the down-to-earth petals of the laceleaf flower on your windowsill

Like the waning pink sky of your night