Bruce Pemberton

Bruce Pemberton is a retired high school teacher, coach, and Gulf War veteran. His most recent work has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Third Wednesday, American Life in Poetry, Foliate Oak, Duck Lake Journal, Ocotillo Review, Thimble, The Wild Word, Rigorous, Streetlight Magazine, Parousia, and the anthologies, In Tahoma's Shadow and Spokane Writes. He lives on the Palouse, in rural eastern Washington state.

Student Union, August 1997

The five-year-old is mine for

two weeks. We’re on campus

and he’s napping on a couch

near a solo piano rehearsal,

as we’re not passing up a free

recital.

I’m trying to study, he’s awake

now, recharged and running

all over and at that age, boys

don’t walk anywhere, as if they

might miss something by slowing

down.

From a pay phone, I call my de-

partment chair, who’s fifty miles

away, to find out when I need to

be back for meetings. Instead, he

tells me a fellow teacher’s three-

year-old dies from brain cancer.

Stunned, I say good-bye and hang

up, just as my son flies past me on

his way to the basement arcade.

I yell at him to get over here. He

slow-walks over, thinking, maybe,

what have I done this time? I grab

him, wrap him up in my arms, and

smother his small head with kisses.

Let’s get you an ice-cream cone,

I whisper. They have chocolate swirl,

he whispers back.