When I was five the world was good
and mortgages flowed like water. Didn’t matter
to me: I hadn’t yet learned to fear the bursting
of bubbles in slow stories told by graphs, but
I would. Still, I welted under a cinched-belt
budget even then. Under my feet, my father
debugged code in the basement while I loafed
and watched the TV flicker. I saw stars
lose their shit and shave their heads and I
laughed. Planes hit towers again and again
like a stuck cassette. Men beheaded men, tanks
rolled into cities. All of it was distant. None
of it mattered much to me. Oh, ignorant ecstasy
of childhood: to hear the father of a friend
was found in his garage and not hear the rumble
of his exhaust pipe. To cry at the funeral
only because my heels were bleeding in their patent
leather prisons. My father only ever spanked me
once, when I kicked him three times in a row.
You’re not the only one who feels, he told me.
—Suze Kay (The Turning Leaf Journal)