Phone Call from a Brown Son

My son calls driving home from work
in the dark, with one headlight,
he mentions too casually.
My heart the beating wings of a trapped thing,
I manage the smallest sips of air.

In the dark he casually mentions one headlight,
and I am a deer standing in my kitchen
choking in a trickle of air.
When do you think you might get that fixed?
I try for nonchalance.

I am a deer standing in my kitchen, suffocating
in the floodlamp of a single imagined headlight.
It’s OK. They can’t stop you for that, he says,
my feigned dispassion a failure.
We don’t say what we’re both thinking.

They can’t stop you for that, he repeats.
In my chest a trapped thing’s beating wings,
kitchen crackling silence, we can’t say
what we’re both thinking when my son calls
driving alone in the dark.

*

Vicki Boyd has made a professional life in education and publishing. She owes her writing life to Mrs. Williford, first grade teacher, who coached her in composing her first sentence, a dictation. When Vicki added embellishments, Mrs. Williford delighted in that, enough to set Vicki writing for life. Vicki has only recently begun writing for publication, her first piece appearing in Teach.Write: A Writing Teachers’ Literary Journal. She lives and walks and kayaks with her wife and their dog Rosie in and around Portsmouth, NH.