Sean Thomas Dougherty, 2021. Photo by Melanie Rae
________________________________________________
Snowglobe
It is late and I want to sleep
but the two girls who work at the gas-station-convenience store
next door have gotten out of work and it’s 2AM and they are laughing
and scraping their cars and I want to peek out the window to see
them push their little plastic scrapers over their early 90s models
Fords and toss snowballs and talk about “Jaime just called” and “God girl, you’re
graced” and I wonder how they will spend the minimum wage
they made tonight, a slow night, with everyone staying in
because of the storm, whether Jaime will take the tall one
out (I recognize her voice from when I buy milk every other
day for my child) and whether she will say My Treat! Or
maybe they will go to a bar, since they seem like they may
almost be that age, though I doubt it, it is so hard
for me to tell now, and they will drink beers
and dance and tenderly wipe the sweat
off of each other’s faces, but then I wonder about the other
girl, where will she go, now that they have started their cars
and I hear their engines about to roar but they don’t, only idle
and idle and I figure they are warming them to get the ice that was too hard
for their little plastic scrapers but they just sit there
so finally I rise from my chair and peek out my curtain
and am startled to see them both in the front seat of the tall girl’s car
and the other one, the one who I think is prettier and who says to my son,
hey sport when he comes in and once tugged his hat over his eyes, she is crying,
crying and saying something I can’t hear over the engine’s
idle, some song is playing something hard on their radio and the snow
is falling and the tall girl is staring up through the windshield and I can’t make out
her expression through the fog whether she is upset or wondering come on
how can I get out of this and get home cause I’m tired when I see her bend
over and take the other girl’s head in her hands and now I can’t get to bed
because it has been almost an hour and their cars are still outside idling
and they are still holding onto each other and the whole world is snowing all at once
like a snowglobe and everything has become fragile and holy, amen.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of twenty books, including the The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things, winner of the 2021 Jacar Press Poetry Prize. “Snowglobe” is taken from his collection, All You Ask for Is Longing: New and Selected Poems, published by BOA Editions in 2014. His book The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018) received both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Housatonic Book Award from Western Connecticut State University. Over the decades he has worked in factories, in a newspaper plant, as an untenured college lecturer, and in a pool hall. He now teaches writing part-time for the Master of Fine Arts Program of WCSU, and works as a Med Tech and caregiver for people recovering from traumatic brain injuries in Erie, Pennsylvania. More info on Sean can be found here.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Two girls in a burnt-out car, 1980s. Photo by Peter Anderson
Go to Source
Author: Terence Winch
