Mary Fontana
Meditation Culminating in a Line From My Son’s Comic Book
I suppose I was afraid he wouldn’t read.
Wouldn’t be a reader. That we would be strange
to each other. When he slept through the night
I feared he was dead. When he wobbled
on the sidewalk I thought he might teleport
eight feet laterally into the murderous street.
All his capabilities were a mystery to me.
Why not flight? Why not tunnels through the void?
When he howled so hard he couldn’t breathe,
his face a red contortion, why not suspect
some plot to torpedo the world? And if I balked
at this ending, did that make us arch-nemeses?
Twist I never saw coming: this child created me.
Stripped a mask. Tripped all my lair’s alarms.
Bit me, sparking powers I didn’t know I had—
little crawler, radioactive in red footies. Now the silk
of the story spins open in his hands. He reads aloud:
“I fell from the sky and you gave me rice and milk.”
The poem’s final line is a quote from Hilo: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth by Judd Winick.
Mary Fontana split her formative years between the surprisingly similar high deserts of central Washington and west Texas. Her first book, a narrative history of the migrant house of hospitality where she has volunteered for the past two decades, is forthcoming. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Rust + Moth, Kestrel, SWWIM Everyday, Moss, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two rambunctious children.