Suzanne Manizza Roszak: “Electric Boat”
ELECTRIC BOAT
All morning they waited for the sun
to rise. The four small sisters, each of them
unfurling a single braid laced with traces
of the night’s long sleep, the one boy
rubbing the eyes his parents had praised
god for, loudly and secularly, when
they first held him. The light’s last
appearance and disappearance had
occurred as expected, by pocket-watch
or by the plastic egg timer beside the stove.
Neither of them seemed any use now,
the curtains drawn tight behind the few
small windows, red darkness warming
the house. It had started with their father,
with one of his usual explosions: something
unhearable to the children, a complaint
about the factory floor, then an ugly slur
and a silence. When the five flushed faces
darted out, their father’s mouth was
frozen wide, his cheeks askew. Snakes
coiled outward from the well of his throat
and around his head, their papery tongues
flicking. Later from the beds they fled to
the children would hear the screen door’s
clack and know it was their mother, undone
by the finality of the two syllables, letting
the stalled night swallow her whole.
Suzanne Manizza Roszak is an assistant professor of English at East Carolina University. Her poetry has appeared in Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, and Third Coast.