Grace An attendant on the worst flight I’ve ever taken—Orlando to Newark, alone, when my husband’s father was dying but I had to go back to work—pointed at my stack of essays to grade and smiled. I nodded, smiled back. So she seated an unaccompanied child beside me. Even the take-off was rough. A flock of gray- clad nuns sorted through rosary beads across the aisle, whispering, each window sealed with clouds the dun hue of their habits. We rose and dropped, rose and dropped. The child—a girl with an Old Testament coloring book—cheered every bump. Loudly. I clung to my principal-in- the-classroom face, sure we were doomed, but we lurched into New Jersey and thumped down: safe at home. At five, I kept flapping my arms and trying to fly off the front steps, landing with my toes stinging inside my shoes. So magic was a bust. Grown, I still have trouble with physics— how counter-intuitive the momentum, the bright, Windex-clear air under jets! My sister says she doesn’t get nervous unless she can imagine a click-bait headline about the disaster about to envelop her: be sure to count the Boy Scouts in line before boarding anything. But all of these are human inventions. Might as well listen to the creek after a 3 AM rain, after its late night shenanigans. Today’s sunlight is my late mom hanging out sheets to dry and the wind is how she flapped them first. I think that could be grace.
Christine Potter lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Sweet, Mobius, Eclectica, Kestrel, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Fugue, and been featured on ABC Radio News. She has poetry forthcoming in The Midwest Quarterly. Her time-traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen.
Amethyst Review 