The Real Thing

© Beth Roberts

When the winter sun wakes a snake it jumps the gun. Unhinged by a preternatural spring, the kids and I tried the snowshot hill right before our eyes. In the snow three ovoid boys made a man, boy being father to the man, while we wrote in the snow Rosalie, mom, uncanny and fresh with overuse as the real red rose. What I thought too soon was too late, fireworks that made a sunlick strike were fake and the real thing made a man cool into slush beneath a car, me to spin the kids into a tree. The one deciduous in all the field, the biggest of the boys flattened and flung get down you idiots you're gonna get shot to the two maybe smaller for still downhill and caught in the waves of sound, not shot down.