by Emily Wharton
Between the town park and swimming pool ran a strip of trees just dense enough to be considered a wind break by adults and a forest by eight year olds. Once on my evening patrol,I encountered one of my enemies. I can’t remember what he said about me not being able to see very well, it was probably something as generic as calling me "four-eyes.” He wasn’t even bright enough to come up with Stevie Wonder or Mr. McGoo. Fortunately the ground had just been aerated and there were plugs of black Iowa dirt everywhere at my feet. I squeezed them into musket balls and started throwing. It felt amazing. We held our positions and maintained a ranged attack. While I aimed mostly for the legs, I know in my heart of hearts that I wanted to hurt him worse than he’d hurt me. But little did I know, nothing I could do would hurt him the way the absence of his parents squeezed him from the inside or his cold but necessary grandmother squeezed him from the outside. We drew no blood and either we grew too tired or it grew too dark. He left me alone after that, so it wasn’t a draw, it was a victory. I didn’t think of it again until I found myself telling my therapist decades later. I puffed out my chest as I proclaimed that ever since this incident, I haven’t entered any situation without making sure I had something I could throw ready at hand. My therapist pretended to write something. Really she was just giving me a moment in the hopes that I might hear what I was saying. I think she expected me to realize this might be more of a problem than a solution. She thought I might connect some dots and finally recognize the shape bleeding through every page, the one that has stared her in the face for months. But I barely take a breath before I explain how it’s not a problem—not if I squeeze my ammo really tight but don’t throw, or if I just never strike first, or if I make sure I only aim for the legs.
Emily Wharton earned her MFA from Hamline University. She has had poems published in the Minnesota Poetry Calendar, the Backwards City Review, After Brunch Poetry Journal, and forthcoming in Book of Matches and the Shame / less and Rough Diamond Mental Health anthologies. She is the author of Zoomorphic: A Chapbook More information about her poetry and other projects can be found at https://poetry.one. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa, with her wife and their tiny Sheltie named Haiku.
