Quilted Rainbows
Water moved in triangles
reflecting off cement walls.
The summer storm quilted
bouncy rainbows in unexpected places,
shadowing the bricks of the pizza place
on 43rd in color,
while kids traded pocket change
for slices and sodas.
Summer hasn’t been fun
since childhood—feet burnt
on hot asphalt, the smell
of chlorine from the community
pool, red lipstick from Italian ices
on sun blistered lips.
Joy existed in an unreplicated ease—
in freedom of play.
But adult-disappointment masks itself
as a person who sucks the calcium
from your bones.
Life can leave you brittle,
and splintered with sharp exposed
fragments—only the leftovers
of what was once healthy
and whole remain.
Pain appeared when the molars grew,
stretching a line across life,
half-hidden wisdom in back teeth.
Calcium doesn’t distribute knowledge.
As a kid in choir, I was taught to sing out
by opening my mouth two fingers wide.
Now, as an adult, I bite down on sandwiched
pointer and middle fingers to remember my voice.
The kids eat pizza under the shop awning,
the summer storm ebbing. In my pocket,
quarters and dimes, saved for the trolley to work.
About the Author: Jane-Rebecca Cannarella (she/her) is a writer and editor living in West Philadelphia. She edits HOOT Review, Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, and was an editor for Lunch Ticket from 2015 to 2017. Jane-Rebecca is the author of the flash fiction collections, Better Bones (Thirty West Publishing House) and Thirst and Frost (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), as well as the poetry collections, A Practical Almanac for Surviving Inside the Human Body (Bottlecap Press), Eleven Hundred (Really Serious Lit), and others. She works as a paralegal for an immigration law firm.
Image Credit: Franz von Stuck “Rainbow Landscape” Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
As It Ought To Be 