BY SUSANNAH W. SIMPSON
Forthcoming in the author’s collection, Blue Agape (Fernwood Press, 2026). Susannah is a CommuterLit Volunteer Submission reader. From time to time, we highlight the work of our volunteer team. Copyright is held by the author.
Summer, 1972 Buffalo, NY
The Chi-Lites were singing “Oh girl, I’d be in trouble if you left me now . . . ” And Bill Withers asked her to “Lean on Me.” She was 16, sent away from her summer home into the steamy city, into the hospital for children where the smell of Salisbury steak, instant mashed potatoes, and canned peas hung over the children’s damp heads. Her bus ride was half of each early hour and in the heat her cotton dresses stuck to her thighs and the molded turquoise seats. She rode the bus to put distance between the farmhouse, a mother in free-fall, and corn in the fields. It was a summer of transcribing dreamscapes from the swelter of sleep. It was a summer of early Sesame Street songs, those lyrics she didn’t know, and knowing the Activities Director met her lover on lunch breaks, then cleaned up in the bathroom, cat bath in the sink followed by showering her panties with Shower-to-Shower. It was a summer of pale children with translucent skin, tiny tubes, and bandages. Children too weak to come to the playroom, sometimes too listless to play with plastic blocks on their white beds. In each afternoon’s aftermath, she climbed onto the Williamsville bus, climbed three bus steps into the smell of diesel and coins and found a cool pane of glass to rest her forehead for the ride home.
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Susannah W. Simpson is a hospice nurse and an ESL tutor. Her poetry has been published in North American Review, Potomac, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, POET, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, Salamander, Sequestrum, and Xavier Review among others. Her book: Geography of Love & Exile was published in December 2016 by Cervena Barva Press (Somerset, MA). She is the founder and co-director of Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches Monthly Reading Series. Pine Row Press has accepted her poetry collection Mother Wind for publication in late fall/winter 2024. And Shanti Arts Press will publish her poetry collection Dharma of Death and Desire in 2025. She is based in Florida.