Somerset
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
By Sally O'Brien
It’s not the hole itself, but the splintered bits
of shattered door around it that tear your arm
to ribbons as you pull your fist back through—
not absence but the ragged edges of presence.
It’s not the days the kid blows off school entirely;
it’s the days he cuts then shows up later for poetry,
rumpled, and inhales half a pizza in bleary silence—
not the lacuna, but the fragments you keep trying to
rearrange. When the kid wrote Somerset changed me
you asked him what he meant. And he told you:
the little girl pushing a baby stroller, a smaller kid
toddling alongside. The dad told them, I’ll catch up,
keep walking, and came over to cop from me. I knew his
kids were gonna turn back and look. I served him anyway.
And then about the woman who looked normal
until she got close and turned sideways; half her face
was eaten away by sores. Told you about his disgust.
It’s not the numb white center of the burn, but the
outer ring of living tissue, growing in, that stings—
I said, throw your money on the ground. I threw her
two bags down too, made her bend and pick that shit up,
like she wasn't even human. I became someone else while
I was out there. I could tell I was starting to disappear.
You blink that image back, looking over at the kid,
asleep with his head down on your desk, where you
have parked him today to keep him from leaving.
Yesterday you finessed him for his backpack so he’d
stay, wore it all through class, the corners of his beloved
thesaurus jabbing your spine. Is there some perfect word
that will keep him from dissolving? On your lips,
each syllable becomes as friable as the busted plaster
of the ceiling. Like he’s already punched a skylight
through it and floated off, a shaft of light in his wake.
Sally O'Brien teaches at a public high school in Philadelphia; she lives with her husband & son within earshot of the Market-Frankford Line. Her poetry has previously appeared in Apiary, Duende, and Psaltery & Lyre. She is around on Bluesky @sallyohbrien.bsky.social.
