Nighttime Nuance
Location
When I stood at the dining room window
eating my cereal, watching
the dark backyard, listening to
the rain, I had the urge to fling
my cereal, spill my milk all
outside
pour it down the windowsill
liquid mixing and lapping and running together
becoming a pool on the cement below
for the day had been the kind
when everything melted and blended and sloshed together
all of it making nonsense
each minute a tumultuous wreckage of its own.
Like that morning, my mother had a breakdown
and something inside her mothering brain had told her
to punish me
for a forgotten chore.
“Mail can’t sit in the mailbox all night.”
My loathsome trip to school
no transportation
feet slap-slap-slapping the pavement
I arrived twenty minutes late
to my twenty-minute homeroom.
Teacher scowl
carving into my self-esteem
with sharp words
and harsh reprimands
my façade crumbles around me.
Shoved violently in the hall
my neck snapped
crack like a baseball striking a bat
“Losers don’t deserve to live.”
But someone stepped in.
Someone stepped forward –
for me.
No one’s stepped forward –
for me
– before.
Black black night with rain drizzles
slicing the dark air clean.
That’s what had happened to me.
Someone wiped my ugly heart clean.
Someone standing up for me
and not even knowing
that the lunacy had ground to a stop,
disappearing as quickly as
the fake smile that slips off my chin
as soon as mother’s back is turned.
Milk and cinnamon toast crunch
never tasted so good.