Brilliance
My son’s talent during football is gifted by archangels in the field. Then he loses a contact lense, so he’s benched. He’s played before without contacts, as if seraphs would guide him. From the sideline, I scold the coach. After, want to throw myself from our slow-moving car. Destroy the dark cave of my meddle. But my son gathers me, carries me close with admiration. Although I know the absurd odds of live boys as angels, I imagine his wings forming. Something in his DNA, a genetic intricacy. Years later when a loudness mounts his brain, whittles him numb like flesh after surgery, I question genetics. Wearing bandanas for shoes, he runs around his college town while my husband tries to keep up. When he isn’t running, he studies fractals of light,
three-dimensional formulas that don’t exist but swarm him. I wonder about angels, what pain and revolution it takes to form wings. When my son finally crashes, his bed is his only refuge, his only gift after mania, mattress sunken in.
Playing Clue from the Afterlife with Her Husband Who’s Alive
The wife appears as grief, her body
gone to urn, placed under an old
maple tree in upstate New York.
The husband grapples grief,
his body leveled against time
without sex or intimacy.
He tosses the dice before trying
to guess the answers to what is life?
What is death? Who’s killed
who, where, and with what?
The wife lingers amid the game’s
mirage of how it is they once loved.
She watches the husband narrow
down clues, move his blue
game piece to the library, so he
can choose the rope for Professor
Plum to use in that room. He thinks
each check mark on the score
sheet might help his wife and him
communicate, help him find
more than just game answers
of suspect, weapon, room. Next,
he plays for his wife, chooses
Ms. Scarlet, with the wrench,
in the lounge. He hesitates before
opening the case file envelope.
Wonders if his wife would have
chosen these answers. Tries to
remember her, knowing their
marriage is only memory now,
his one hand trembling toward
a flat doorway on a cardboard
replica of loneliness, chance, death.
Theresa Senato Edwards has published 3 poetry books— one, with painter Lori Schreiner, winning The Tacenda Literary Award—and two chapbooks. Nominated twice for a Pushcart, once for Best of the Net, and once for Best Small Fictions, Edwards is also owner, publisher, & EIC of American Poetry Journal as of April 2025. Her website is www.theresasenatoedwards.com