Aperture

I love the bench that overlooks the baseball
field that overlooks the house that looks like
"Church, Sprott, Alabama, 1977": A shock
of white among pine. It's mine. I try to love
the gap, the blur, the way things collapse
or expand with just one look: Now morning,
next evening; reprising worth the risk
like Heaney's double-take of feeling.
Or how—at my brother's games, before
everything changed —my father led me
along the clay fringe in time-killing loops
he called trips around the earth: We are
in Russia, he'd say with each clover scuff.
Now Malaysia. Now Italy. Next, Mexico.

–Sarah Edwards

Sarah Edwards is an editor in Durham, North Carolina. She has fiction and poetry published in Subtropics, The Stinging Fly, Annulet, The Yale Review, Brink, Ninth Letter, The Southern Humanities Review, Joyland, and The Carolina Quarterly, among others.