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