Rain. Rainbow. Children of God by David E. Poston

It is a brand-new box of sidewalk chalk,
carried by a five-year-old girl who wandered
across the road into the parking lot of the abandoned
Cinderella Knitting Mill at dusk while her parents
were playing spades with their best friends
around the kitchen table.

Prying a door loose from its rotting frame
has saved the man a five-mile walk in the rain
to the Salvation Army shelter, but he is still numb
enough with cold to risk a small fire. Outside,
the clouds have moved east, and just as he starts
to feel his fingers again, something catches his eye
through the mill’s bleared window-panes, arcs of
pink and blue sweeping across the concrete
of the parking lot as if drawn by an invisible hand.
Her pale nightdress blends that well into the dusk.

He’s sober tonight, more or less, so what is he seeing?
He picks up a smoldering stick, and steps outside
for a closer look, just as the girl’s mother senses she is gone.

So beautiful, he says out loud. An angel is
bending over a rainbow. The girl looks up
to see the red tip’s glow floating above her head.



David E. Poston is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Letting Go (Fernwood Press, 2026). His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Cider Press Review, Garfield Lake Review, Bull, North Carolina Literary Review, and Kakalak, among others.