Bonnie Proudfoot
Household Gods
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Bonnie Proudfoot writes fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays. Her novel, Goshen Road (OU/ Swallow Press) received WCONA’s Book of the Year and was Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway. Her 2022 poetry chapbook, Household Gods, can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, which is also publishing a forthcoming book of short stories, Camp Probable. Bonnie resides in Athens, Ohio. Learn more about Bonnie at https://bonnieproudfootblog.wordpress.com/
A Space Lit by Fireflies
(after Yoyoi Kusama)
In the surgical center waiting lounge
cell phones bloom like poppies
or dots in a Kusama painting.
She calls it stereotypical repetition,
how a universe recreates itself.
but here, it’s about how life recreates itself,
cell by cell, an echo, a glow, then another.
Relatives cluster and orbit the call board,
cell phones flash fluorescence.
Kusama dreamed a space out of time,
an infinite waiting room. All our eyes flicker
when a nurse with a clipboard slips in,
flips through her list, calls a surname.
The space electrifies with buzz, ding,
click or ping, ring tones fluent in who, when,
where. One family hurries out. Another
settles in. The coffee grows stale. Again
and again my cells must relearn this word.
Wait. Wait. A small light. Then another.
