Playback
by Susan Eyre Coppock
My first love all fall and smash. Aunt Girt declaring “He’s a loser and he knows it. You’re not and he knows that too.” She spoke sincerely while absently picking fuzz balls off her sweater, renewing it for the umpteenth time. We were driving along back roads in her ‘57 Chevy, dust clouding the air, me at the wheel while she gave me a driving lesson. “Focus on what’s ahead, not what’s behind,” she emphasized, me wavering slightly into the ditch but correcting sharply, her words collecting before me like she had dipped her hand in ink and fingered them wet onto the dry sky, renewing it.
Susan Eyre Coppock is a retired French teacher. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Nixes Mate, Common Ground Review, museum of americana, Paterson Literary Review, Free State Review, and elsewhere. Her poem ‘Other Falls’ was a semi-finalist in the Orchard Street Press 2024 poetry contest where it appeared with other winning poems in their journal Quiet Diamonds.