Giving My Son His Meds the Morning of the Big Meteor Storm

Astronomers predict this year’s Leonids meteor display, expected to appear before dawn Sunday,will be a dazzler worth missing a little sleep.—Joseph B. Verrengia Associated Press Science Writer

Today, like every other, the crucial practice:
the typed bottle pulled from kitchen shelf.
Plastic syringe plunging deep into thick
orange fluid, I draw the potent stream
to the prescribed mark, and with one thin squirt,
dose a cup of cran-apple juice so he won’t
taste anything sinister, won’t know his parents
are messing with his head. Amazing, how little
it takes to turn the lights on, to make
the synapses, sleepy dogs, sit up and bark..
This morning as I dispensed the tiny
blitz of chemical that lights up his mind’s
shadowed corners, people everywhere stood
in parks, on mountaintops,
wore pajamas on their soggy lawns,
waiting to see a shower of flaming dust
that turned the sky’s dark dome
into something rare and spectacular. All those
eyes fixed on bright heavenly bodies.
All those chins lifting up.

*Michelle Bitting has work forthcoming or published in Glimmer Train, Swink, Prairie Schooner, Small Spiral Notebook, Clackamas Literary Review, Nimrod, The Southeast Review, Quercus Review, Ink and Ashes, Rock & Sling, Slipstream, Dogwood, Salt Hill, Chiron Review (featured), Pearl, Rattle, Slipstream, Phoebe, and others. She has won the Glimmer Train, Rock & Sling, and Poets On Parnassus Poetry Competitions. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Phil Abrams, an actor. They have two children, Elijah and Vera Rose.