Un Día Ordinario
—Erica Goss
Un Día Ordinario
Afternoons are for dragonflies. They loop overhead,
back and forth above my tiny plastic pond. Four
children are found alive after a plane crash. How
did they survive? Some combination of love and
emergency propelled them, looping back and forth
from the small pile of wreckage, their mother’s body,
grandmother’s voice calling and calling. The dragonflies
hover, reflected on the surface of the pond. They stare
into the distance with their huge red eyes. From above, the
jungle is a flat green surface, sealed against searchlights,
keeper of children. They hide from grandmother’s voice, the
love that calls them back to what they fled. Their
mother told them, “make oars from my body, and float like
Noah.” Forty days in the ark of the jungle.
Ominous, predatory, dragonflies swerve like tiny
planes. It was an ordinary day, just another
quiet afternoon when the children were found, hiding from their
rescuers, the dog’s joyous bark as if he’d located
smuggled goods. All eyes turned to the jungle,
thoughts and prayers like a grandmother’s voice, like a glitchy
unseen embrace. The dragonflies land, wings laced with red
veins, arteries pumping, pumping. Jungle rises like
walls on either side of a path just wide enough for a child,
X’ed over and over by the press of bare feet. How tender, the
yearning in grandmother’s voice. The children, one step from the dead
zone. Their huge eyes. The slant of the afternoon sun.
About
ERICA GOSS is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. She has received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, as well as a 2023 Best American Essay Notable. Recent and upcoming publications include The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Gargoyle, Spillway, West Trestle, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.