I’ll pick you up before the matinee, and we’ll ride together,
unmasked, eager for that once familiar dark, mother and daughter
sipping sodas, eating popcorn, chomping Goobers, juggling
Raisinets that somehow slip from sticky hands to melt unnoticed
in our laps.

At this point, we don’t much care what we see, though I always
warn against taking me to a horror flick, living alone, needing
to pass through growing fields of corn, slowing at the tracks,
my mind continually fertile with all the miraculous what ifs—
Mothman, Grassman, aliens.

To ease us back, we’ve settled on a Disney flick, hoping for laughs,
that over-the-top ease with which we can tell straight off who’s the
hero, who the villain is, though with the title we already know he’s
a she. Still, it will take a lot to scare us off, eager as we are for
this buttered normalcy.

We hope the fireflies survived a year of shuttered life. No Disney
magic there, just an open door, a flutter in, a cool place to land
on a hot summer day, and the rest, as they say, is history Do others
see them as we do? Quick flickers of light in this daytime dark,
signaling anything and everything is possible.