Daughter at the Fair

by Brian D. Morrison

All of this is wrong. Height requirements
are fallible. In Muncie,

we live with the wind and the crocuses,
already dying in May.

The Ferris wheel is a deathtrap.

Cotton candy drops like ragweed
fluff, then we stop, high up.

She cries, and I’m there, a cartoon
figure of Dad, my kid lost in shriek

I can’t dissolve. Wile E. Coyote
has made a mistake, I say.

This machine doesn’t catch birds.
She kicks off a blue rain boot.

Sometimes the world is dangerous.

I tell her the story about when I was a boy,
when my mother hit a preacher’s van,

or the van hit us, and she lost her mind.
I tell her the world is weird that way,

that anger is just fear, and it comes
from the bottom of us,

moves all the way up. I tell her to never
look down. Never, and never fall.

— from Juniper Volume 2, Issue 3