Nancy Smahl-Syrop

MISTRUST

It is fall, the bubble is up.
She spies–her child
with his coach.
His hand guiding his–

She peers through
a square cutout
from a heavy vinyl curtain,
her oval face just fits.

Long florescent lights
sway from wind gusts.
Yellow balls blur,
she's brought back

to then when, her brown
hair flowed, her fingers
in the fixer, its odor seeped
into her nostrils. From

station to station he crept.
His hand guided hers–
safe light swayed from
darkened school attic.

She thinks now
again of when, the very
first time she saw
that image of fern tree

appear like magic, how
the metal stool scraped,
how he reached up
to the wooden clothes pins

pulling each corner taut
she adjusting her Levi's
squinting as the door
opened to lit hallway.


Nancy reads "Mistrust":



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Nancy confesses: "The Wall Street Journal on June 4, 2014 ran articles about Robert Rusch, a teacher at the former Woodward School who had sex with 12-year-old students and the long-lasting effects such abuse had on the women portrayed. I was one of those women."


NANCY SMAHL-SYROP has been taking poetry workshops at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Her work has appeared in Sediments Literary-Arts Journal.