By Ian Willey
PROMPT — No one noticed ...
A girl on the train was crying and no one noticed. No one noticed as something fell from the bottom of a B-29 as it passed over the city at an altitude of 31,000 feet. A boy is made to go to school even though he wants to stay home because he thinks he’s had an awful haircut but his parents say that is no reason to stay home from school so he goes and comes home amazed and a little disturbed that no one noticed. The cicadas scream in the summer heat up until the moment of the flash and no one notices when they stop or at least there’s no way to know that no one noticed. A couple of crows chase after a hawk in the strip of blue above the buildings but no one on the train noticed because everyone was immersed in their phones. Later the boy pours his heart into a few paragraphs of prose which gets posted somewhere but as the weeks roll by he fears no one noticed. The girl gets off the train and walks along the river close to where ground zero was and when she looks up she wonders if anyone else has noticed these clouds.
Ian Willey is an English teacher from Akron, Ohio who currently lives in the inland sea area of Japan. His poems have appeared in such journals as Modern Haiku, One Sentence Poems, and Unbroken. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2019 and 2020.
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