By Ben Pease
It was sixty degrees at the end of winter in Vermont. I took the stroller from the back of the car and snapped my child into it. I said this will be the first time you see the stars on this clear night, knowing her eyes were barely strong enough to see her mother across the room. In truth I said nothing and hoped she could see into the night though the lights on the bridge made her squint, made it so I couldn’t see her or her the sky. People in Vermont go to the store in t-shirts once it hits forty, but I had on a jacket and owned little else, few lights once off the bridge and my daughter looked again like my mother, looked to my in-laws like their lost kin or themselves, and my daughter, silently within a new world in a new season, decked in a pink outfit with magnetic clasps and a grey cap with bunny ears, looked at her father or the dark sky and its strange glittering lights and said nothing, took to no precedent, shifted endlessly in her becoming.
Ben Pease (he/him) spends his time writing poetry, designing books, making dice, and supporting other artists. He is a co-founder of the literary nonprofit The Ruth Stone House, and his most recent publications include the hybrid poetry collection, Furniture in Space: Selections from an Epic of Mysticism and Comradery, and The Light of Mount Horrid, a Dungeons & Dragons adventure module full of writerly ghosts and letterpress-printing monsters.
Hot Pot Magazine 