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Fireflies
     by Kevin Prufer

 

He was fifteen

and feeling hassled

and he asked his mother to

please fuck off,

so she slapped him

hard

and told him to get out of the car

because he could

walk home.

 

+

 

As he walked,

his anger smoldered.

He imagined her car

crushed against a tree,

he imagined her pleading

for help

as he strode right past

toward home

exactly as she’d commanded—

 

+

​

and half an hour later,

as he rounded the corner

to their yellow house,

he saw her blue Honda

in the driveway,

and knew

she was already at her desk

because

 

+

 

it was evening,

because she had homework,

because

she had her accounting class

early in the morning

at the college

 

and still he was angry,

though his anger

had lost its focus—

 

+

 

why had he said

what he’d said?

Why had she slapped

her own son?

Anyway,

he wanted to hate her

​

+

 

but it was a beautiful summer evening,

the chirring of crickets,

the fireflies—

 

he would remember the fireflies years later

rising and falling

in the gloom,

 

+

 

his old gray cat

uncurling on the porch steps,

walking

up to him, purring

and rubbing her cheek

against his leg

there beneath the streetlamp.

 

+

 

The cat was long dead,

 

but his mother was still alive.

Just today

he’d brought her another mystery novel,

then sat with her in her

hot little apartment

while she went on

about what someone or other

said to someone else,

he didn’t try to keep track,

 

+

 

but as she spoke,

his mind reached back to that evening

long ago,

            

how he’d stood in front of their old yellow house

in the hot evening,

his hatred dissipating

among the now-extinct fireflies

that rose and fell

above the rhododendrons.

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I’ve always been interested in the way a poem can move through time, making use of white space and shifts in narration to accomplish that movement.  Also, how memory works in a poem—how, in this case, the boy’s conflict with his mother in his memory is every bit as real as the present day, when she has grown old and reads mystery novels in the hot little apartment they never lived in together.  It’s this telescoping of time and memory that excited me as I wrote this, and the complex dissipation of childhood anger.

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