Susanna Donato
Valentine’s Day
For seventeen in Parkland, Florida
1.
Is this ever going to stop, someone asks. Someone replies,
Only if we do something, and we’re not going to do anything.
Ignoring it is something.
2.
Neighbors air their closet, shrinkwrap-shrouded garments
rustling on porch beams—T-shirts, plaid flannel, denim,
the kind of clothing we call clothing but we mean
men’s clothing. Yet these neighbors are women in boots, jeans,
short practical hair, a shiny white camper, a pergola
they stained themselves this fall. Something fills me with joy
in the squareness of it all—they are they and nothing else,
universal, particular.
3.
On election night I couldn’t stop jigging at Will Call.
My daughter recited words I’ve said a hundred times to her,
shush, shush, you seem really frenetic. She embraced my shoulder
to still me. I had no words for that first hour I dared think
Hillary might win. Something ended that night, in me, at the balcony’s edge,
as Courtney Barnett tried to fiddle our fate away. Let’s just be here tonight,
she called, There’s time later for news. Something like that.
Her guitar louder than I’d expected. No folkiness, her boots
on the pedalboard, the blue-and-red Google glow of the crowd
tapping refresh, refresh, on the map that said something in all of us
was done.
Susanna Donato is a Denver-based writer whose poems have appeared in Entropy and Columbia, and essays have appeared in Proximity, Okey-Panky, Blue Earth Review, and elsewhere. Learn more at www.susannadonato.com or on Twitter @susannadonato.
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