This Evening: A Triptych
1.
The berries are purple. You are spinning, now spun like cotton candy. It is late spring and it is
beautiful. You’re with a man because it’s one of those blessed, easy evenings. The stars have
aligned, just look at them. One goes blasting across the sky right now like heaven’s own tail. You can hear Van Morrison’s voice coming from over the hill. Glade, you think, is a better, more
beautiful word for it. But either way he comes rolling over the grass, vibrating every blade with
his big Godly voice. Magnificently we will flow into the mystic.
2.
There’s the town park and there’s the kid band from high school setting up to play their three
songs. You are cooking hamburgers on one of those public shit grills. The oil is spurting onto
your white golf shirt. Those stains won’t come out, you know it. Out of the corner of your eye,
you see your daughter with her shoes off. Daughter, hell she’s her own person now. She goes
walking slowly over the hill with some kid you’ve never seen before and the band strikes up and
their rhythm is off but they are playing one of your favorite Van Morrison songs and you think,
hell with it and drink down the rest of your beer and take off your stained shirt and wiggle to the music.
3.
You’re watching this giant blue orb, framed by the edges of your stroller, and every once in a
while a big giant peach or coffee or milk white colored face comes in, flapping big long
eyelashes. They look just like your mother but nothing like her at all, which is bewitching. You
suck your thumb. That feels nice. Your mother picks you up, sings into your ear, I want to rock
your gypsy soul. Little do you know that you’ll remember none of that, but you will remember
that feeling—easy and free. You’ll always associate it with hamburgers and bad guitar playing
and grass.
Katie Rice earned her BA in English: Creative Writing from Colgate University. She currently works at Penguin Random House and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poems have appeared in IthacaLit, Rkvry Quarterly Literary Journal, Hot Bath Cold Whiskey and Black Bottom Review. Her short fiction has appeared in Pif Magazine.