Therese Gleason
Central Massachusetts, U.S.A. February, 2025
Last night I slipped off the bottom step onto the front walk, leash in hand, yanking the poor dog with me—thank God for the hooded down jacket hanging below my knees that cushioned my skull, spine, and hips. I landed flat on my back like a snow angel, dazed, until my breath came back into my body and I could see stars glittering between the maple’s naked branches and I realized I’m fine, I’m alright. But my knees were shaky when I got up, adrenaline surging, panic slow to subside: my neighbor’s father fell on the ice in his driveway last winter and ended up paralyzed.
Later, lying in bed trying to sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking of the little boy in my class with glossy black curls and a gap-toothed grin. Lately, he’s taken to worrying his gold chain and holy medal in his fingers, between his teeth. He can’t stay in his chair; he gets up and draws close to me, pressing his small body into my side, where I sit at a kidney-shaped table in a basement classroom with damp walls that nothing sticks to in front of a whiteboard with magnetic letter cards alphabetized in neat rows, teaching children to read.
I don’t say anything, don’t tell him to go back to his seat because it’s what he needs: the solid bulk of an adult at school, which is supposed to be safe. Because (despite the memo sent home to families in a dozen languages), everyone knows the truth: even if we won’t let ICE inside, we can’t prevent them from hanging around the family health center, flexing in the Stop ‘n Shop parking lot, or lurking in the street.
No, the children are not alright. Attendance is down, and when they are in class they fidget and bicker, can’t concentrate. And their parents? As a mother I…fear seeps in like cold through the cinderblock walls of the public housing complex next door to our school (which is named for a park named for an explorer who ‘discovered’ America). It could happen anywhere, anytime, so fast, like my fall on that black ice—one misstep and poof, you can disappear into the night.
In pictures my students draw of themselves with mami and papi, baby brothers and sisters, it’s always sunny with a blue sky. Sometimes they draw me, and I pin the crayoned creations to my cluttered bulletin board, where I smile by their sides with hair that’s impossibly yellow and bright. What does it mean to be a sanctuary? I try to radiate warmth, but our country is in a deep freeze from the inside.
This week at school we go red for American Heart Month and Valentine’s Day. But the groundhog saw his shadow so we’re in for six more weeks of winter, at least, no thaw in sight. I wish we could get a do-over, that Phil could go back to sleep in his burrow and wake up to a new morning, no shadows, only light. But I foresee many more days of indoor recess—slick asphalt, frigid air—unsafe conditions for children to play outside.
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Therese Gleason is author of three poetry chapbooks: Hemicrania (Chestnut Review, 2024), Matrilineal (Finishing Line, 2021), and Libation (2006), co-winner of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Competition. Her poetry, flash, and essays appear in 32 Poems, Cincinnati Review, Indiana Review, Literary Mama, Lunch Ticket–Amuse Bouche, New Ohio Review, On the Seawall, Rattle–Poets Respond, and elsewhere. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, she teaches language and literacy to multilingual learners in a public elementary school in central Massachusetts. She has an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. (Online: theresegleason.com)