By Bonnie Proudfoot
If all of my thoughts have been thought before, who was the one
who thought them? Probably it was some stranger, but maybe not,
maybe it was someone I knew or maybe someone I loved so hard
that she is actually a part of me, like my grandmother,
who came by on poker nights, maybe I inhaled her like the smoke
from the tip of her Parliament, or I ate her up like a slice
of her poundcake with lemon drizzle icing. And my superpowers?
I used to think they were accidents or destiny, like winning
the Lottery, or that someone could be switched at birth, or
that there could be the slightest chance that a baby, say, me,
could have hurtled down to earth on a tiny cradle-shaped spaceship
from a place sort of like Krypton, but maybe all my powers slipped in
under my bedroom door with the smoke, the smell of gin,
the pink and green neon light sifting through those slats
in the venetian blinds, my brain soft and doughy like warm silly putty,
taking in the patterns on the wall, sometimes everything is pink,
and sometimes everything tastes like lemon, sometimes the soundtrack
in my head is the overture to Guys and Dolls, and what the men
in the control booths who want to learn more about brainwashing
don’t know is that once you hear that overture, all you can think of
is how you can’t wait to see Frank Sinatra make his entrance
as Nathan Detroit.
And of course, one day I see myself, in my sixties,
(for crying out loud), seated at my dining room table, facing
my own grown children, using some of my super powers to count
the face cards and take tricks, to know exactly where the line is
between luck and skill, and these fingers of mine start to fuss
for an invisible cigarette, though there is none in sight. And I know
that the odds are good that life will betray them, that their bodies
will betray them, that winning flashes off and on like a Lotto sign,
and that I, who at age six dressed up to trick or treat as a Parliament
flip top box, all white and blue and glowing, I will betray them, too,
I who cracked open the egg and hopped the train, and they, who filled
pickup trucks with sleeping bags and hit the road, but for now I am here,
the dealer, my elder son on my right, thinking things like luck be a lady,
and wash the cards, thinking, shine the bat signal, spin out that web,
go ahead, cut ‘em.
Bonnie Proudfoot lives outside of Athens, Ohio. She has an MA in English from West Virginia University, and another MA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She is a recipient of a Fellowship for the Arts in Creative Writing from the West Virginia Department of Culture and History, and has had fiction and poetry published in the Gettysburg Review, Kestrel, Quarter After Eight, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Northern Appalachia Review, and other journals. Her short story “Old Spirits” placed first in the 2020 Sand Hills Journal Short fiction competition. Goshen Road, her first novel, was published by Swallow Press in January of 2020, and it was selected by the Women’s National Book Association as one of their Great Group Reads for 2020. The novel was selected for the Longlist for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for a Debut Novel.
