Shock Karma
Galvanized with glee
my brother slowly scuffs across the carpet
as if half-stuck while slogging through a tar pit,
finger aimed at me.
Soon he moves much faster.
I scream and run, seek refuge in the kitchen
in hopes that I can find a handy niche in
which to dodge disaster.
No. I can’t avert
it now, the prickling flash— a gnat-sized bomb
exploding. I start yelling for my mom,
wailing how it hurt.
Then a thought that at the time was new—
stings must go both ways. It stung him, too.
Pam Lewis’s poems have appeared previously in Light, and in Lighten Up Online, Poetry East, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, and other places. She once got lost inside a dictionary after dark, due to her clothing being snagged on “kerfuffle.” She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.