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 Contents | December 2003 More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. |
Municipal Playground
by J. Allyn Rosser .....  Hear the author read this poem (in RealAudio)The shockingly green, gold, and red beetle— too petite for a June bug, with greater iridescence and a delicacy of limb and feeler unprecedented in the insect kingdom— walks up her palm to the inside of her wrist. "I must show this bug to that boy," she says of a sulking pre-adolescent I've peripherally watched abuse the for-toddlers-only rocking horses on their rusty springs. He is the wrong boy. The beetle, sensing danger, flies off before I have to make excuses for the boy's inevitably sour or mocking or violent response. Yes, the beetle flies away, probably wanting his mom to make him lunch, we decide, heading for the car, but the boy has noticed her glances, her interest, watches her with a malevolence I hope I'm imagining. He waits, and will be there again tomorrow or next week, and she will approach with her wistful only-child smile, her delighting eyes, to show him something else.
What do you think? Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
J. Allyn Rosser's latest collection is Misery Prefigured (2001). Rosser teaches at Ohio Univeristy. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; December 2003; Municipal Playground; Volume 292, No. 5; 104. |
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