My daughter and I used to play the game on paper
where you draw identical rows of dots and compete
to connect them until you net the most squares.
This was before she became as defiant as wind,
before drama erupted from her mouth like sea salt
and glitter, pigtails hitting her lunchbox as she ran.
I muttered blessings and curses. She murmured about
YouTube videos and Instagram. I meditated. She shrieked.
I broke a plate. She called her father. That’s when
the corners started to disintegrate, became lines
that zig zagged across the page. They became traces,
drifting apart until I could barely recognize them. Her father
bought her a phone without my consent, then invited her
to move into his house. The game was rigged. I ask myself daily,
Why was I a silent pillar of salt? My daughter and I talk
by phone most days and I see her occasionally.
She sleeps in her childhood bed only if her father
has a business trip or visits his girlfriend in Virginia.
I wondered what it would’ve been like if we’d discovered
more fluid shapes like circles, marbles bobbing in a river.
We’d fish them out, then meticulously arrange them
on the bank to ensure that the tiny glass globes
wouldn’t be volleyed like in a tennis match,
but smoothed over with calm and steady fingers.
I wish we’d found another way to mesh, to return
to the surface, one always seeking the other.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 5.
Susan Michele Coronel lives in Ridgewood, Queens. Her debut collection, In the Needle, A Woman, won the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize and was published by Finishing Line Press in 2025. Three poems in the book were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals including Gone Lawn, MOM Egg Review, Nixes Mate, Pedestal, Spillway 29, and SWWIM. In 2023, she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Award.
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