Bounce House

By Lisa Rosinsky

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On the patio of the bar, with my notebook / and a glass of cabernet and a thick slice of chocolate cake, it was all soft summer twilight and table to myself / until two guys said you don’t mind if we join you do you / and since I small-town knew the redhead, as in / met him at a party that one time, I said okay / even though I was trying to write

The redhead pulled my cake across the table, you can’t finish all of this can you, skinny thing like you? and I did want it / but he ate it without waiting for an answer while his friend talked about their job putting up tents, pounding in stakes and then pulling them out again, and his eyes / were the color of a tidal pool, and I sipped my wine wishing you’d given me a ring already / so they would have left me alone with my cake and my solitude 

Wedding tents mostly he said, you wouldn’t believe how they can transform them with curtains and whatnot / it turns out nicer than a church, and they both nodded, yes nicer than a church, and the blue-eyed one / who hadn’t eaten my cake / showed me where on his arm the muscles tensed up after a day of sledgehammering, and I laughed / but suddenly saw how in another life, one without you in it, I might have wanted / to touch those arms, which made everything go blurred and flimsy

Sometimes I do bounce houses too he said, but they’re dangerous, did you hear about the one that blew away, and I closed my notebook / and said what blew away

The bounce house the redhead said, there were two kids in it / and a big gust of wind blew it fifty feet up into the sky, pulled the stakes right out of the ground

With the kids inside? I said, listening now, yeah with the kids inside he said, a boy and a girl, they tumbled around at fifty feet up / and made it back down safe / only the boy had a broken arm but otherwise they were fine

And we sat there in silence picturing that, the three of us, with the cake crumbs / and the wineglass and the unfinished / poem I’d been working on, and within me the waiting seed of the son I’d have one day with you / though I didn’t know that yet, that night, sitting there, it was just me and the strangers and I ached / for those children carried by the wind, tumbling in a house made of rubber and air.

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Lisa Rosinsky has been a finalist for the Slapering Hol Chapbook Prize, Fugue Poetry Contest, and Morton Marr Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Her poems appear in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. In 2016, she won the Writer-in-Residence fellowship at the Boston Public Library, where she completed her debut novel, Inevitable and Only, named one of Barnes & Noble’s “Most Anticipated Indie Novels of 2017.”

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