Because, if we don’t use it, you said,

when you slip and fall we’ll both go down hard.

So, to save yourself, like moon to tide

you towed me around the ice rink  

with the kitchen broom extended  

between us, you at the handle and me

clutching the wide straw sweeping end.  

Years later, skating the canal without you  

the broom you sent along became a handicap.

I ditched it in the chattering weeds

and faked a precarious balance chasing after  

my cousins (all boys) up and down the frozen miles

dodging paper-sharp edges of cattail fronds,  

jumping jagged holes, tripping over snake grass  

clumps stranded in the ice, clumsily negotiating

the dips and bends, the time  

and the distance from home.  

Tonight, under pulsing green northern lights

sweeping new snow from the porch

my thumbnail, torn to the quick

from lacing hockey skates, throbs against

this old broom’s splintered handle.  

Far away in this other life here in Alaska

I sit rink side watching my three sons  

learn to skate on their own

because their mother—weak in the ankles  

stiff in the knees—never mastered balance on blades.  

Across the miles I’ve placed between us, tell me how to teach  

them lessons I failed. Every day from a safe distance I watch  

them falter and forget to at least slide them a broom.  

Alone and outnumbered, at ninety degrees longitude  

and two time zones from home, I’m still grasping at straws.  

By Shelly Norris

From: United States