A woman makes eye contact and breaks a dinner plate from the set her grandmother gave her at her wedding shower and remembers making eye contact with a screaming cat that was hit by an oncoming pickup truck that roared past with a honky grin and she lifted her foot off the brake and she leaned forward into the breaking wave of it. Which was when she remembered being a teenager who made breakfast for her grandfather every Sunday and made him breakfast an hour late and took a long time watching a cartoon before waiting for a commercial and walking upstairs and finding him in bed, too late, too cold, far too cold. Being a teenager who remembered the broken arm of riding a bicycle between parked cars into traffic; not as pain, but as the expression on her mother’s face when she looked at the curb and knelt down to triage, and a dizzy tumbling beneath that face, open mouthed. The same arm now holding the shard of the plate in a unique, for her, silence.
Researcher Terry Trowbridge’s poems are in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Carousel, Lascaux Review, Kolkata Arts, Leere Mitte, untethered, Snakeskin Poetry, Progenitor, Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Pinhole, Big Windows, Muleskinner, Brittle Star, Mathematical Intelligencer, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, New Note, Hearth and Coffin, Synchronized Chaos, Indian Periodical, Delta Poetry Review, Literary Veganism and more. His lit crit is in BeZine, Amsterdam Review, Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, Studies in Social Justice, Rampike, and The/t3mz/Review. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant.
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