Elizabeth Oness
Independence Day
Hugging the Hudson’s edge
on the way to Cold Spring Harbor,
in the gray and lavender dusk
the amphitheater a lit jewel
at the Hudson’s throat.
West Point on July 4th because
the cadets would say “sir,”
because once a boy at home
lit firecrackers near us,
called my angry father an ass.
In the flanging dark my mother tried
to pull my father off the boy,
her slender silhouette
like a shadow puppet full of holes.
West Point because they played
the 1812 Overture
and my father liked cannons,
the precision of their explosions
the sulfured smoke blowing down
the river, dark on shadowed dark.
When the fireworks were over,
we leaned in the backseat
like spent bowling pins.
The stone pillars, granite walls
radiant in the sulphur-sparked air.
Our father idled in the lot,
waiting out the traffic.
Jean Shepherd was on WOR—
the radio of my childhood filled
with capital letters, mysterious words:
tie-ups on the BQE, back-ups on the FDR,
Verrazano, Guwanas, Tappan Zee.
But Shepherd was telling a story
that filled the doughy curve
of my father’s cheek:
“Ludlow Kissell and the Dago Bomb.”
I remember little of the story––
boys being bad,
but my father laughed so hard
he forgot to drive, forgot the traffic,
forgot the exhaustion
of another mirthless holiday.
He laughed at long-ago mischievousness,
at made-up disaster, laughed because
his daughters hadn’t yet escaped
his grasp, because explosiveness
in stories is curtailed by narrative,
because I hadn’t yet grown up
to tell stories of my own
Elizabeth Oness is a writer and musician who lives on a biodynamic farm in Minnesota. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, The Tahoma Literary Review, and other magazines. Her stories have received an O. Henry Prize, a Nelson Algren Award, and the Crazyhorse (now Swamp Pink) Fiction Prize. Her books include: Articles of Faith (winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize), Departures (Penguin), Twelve Rivers of the Body (winner of the Gival Press Novel Award), Fallibility (winner of the New Rivers Press Many Voices Award), and Leaving Milan (winner of the Bright Horse Books Novel Award).