My mother used to snap her fingers
and say, “My mind is fast, at least
one step ahead of yours.” That was what
she said to my father any time he stopped
to correct her from some silly assertion
he knew was silly but that he thought
my mother would regret if she said it
to anyone but him. Like the time
she said the moonshot was filmed on stage,
the astronauts actors, the moon a cardboard set,
the earth suspended in the black background,
an inflated balloon she could puncture
with a pin. “I would pop that pretend planet,”
she said, “if only I could get there to explode
the farce. Won’t you take me there? Please?”
“Now you don’t really believe that do you,
Lucille,” my father said, to which she, smiling, replied,
“My mind is fast, at least one step ahead of yours,”
her fingers snapping like the tap tap tap of a dancer.
They are both gone now, and I imagine
them standing on the surface of the moon
whenever the porcelain moon is full,
my mother with a pin in hand, my father saying,
“You don’t want to do that, now do you?”
as he reaches toward my mother happily pretending
to pop the earth just to prove a point.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 3.
V. P. Loggins is the author of The Wild Severance (2021), winner of the 26th Annual Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition, The Green Cup (2017), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Book Prize, The Fourth Paradise (Editor’s Select Poetry Series, Main Street Rag 2010), and Heaven Changes (Pudding House Chapbook Series 2007). He has also published one book on Shakespeare, The Life of Our Design, and is co-author of another, Shakespeare’s Deliberate Art. His poems and articles have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Crannog (Ireland), The Dalhousie Review (Canada), English Journal, The Healing Muse, Memoir, Modern Age, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Poetry Ireland Review, The Southern Review and Tampa Review, among other journals.
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