by Bex Hainsworth
For Mercie Lack and Barbara Wagstaff
Summer, 1939, and the past is pressing itself
against windowpanes like the children
in your classes when the planes fly overhead.
Gas masks clunk in cardboard, there is
a parade of plague doctors in the playground.
Time doesn’t feel linear: it folds like an accordion,
like the earth beneath a plough.
Hawaii Pacific Review 