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I want to uncurve us from the bedpost's polished
glass and cannot. We stay there, flailing just
beneath the surface of the light we darken
with dark eyes and our bodies using the light
to flail. The bedroom window is all sky.
If I could fill it with you, I'd be alone.
In the mornings, I remember less than ever.
The days lie straight out of the room and only
begin to curve hours later, turning away
from every surface polished enough to catch light
or the two of us as we still are.
If this goes on for long, I will always love you.
~Donald Revell
I bring the cat’s body home from the vet’s
in a running-shoe box held shut
with elastic bands. Then I clean
the corners where she has eaten and
slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food
from the baseboard, dumping the litter
and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic
dishes I hide in the basement, the pee-
soaked towel I put in the trash. I put
the catnip mouse in the box and I put
the box away, too, in a deep
dirt drawer in the earth.
When the death-energy leaves me,
I go to the room where my daughter slept
in nursery school, grammar school, high school,
I lie on her milky bedspread and think
of the day I left her at college, how nothing
could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax
out from between her floorboards,
or taking a razor blade to the decal
that said to the firemen, “Break
this window first.” I close my eyes now
and enter a place that’s clearly
expecting me, swaddled in loss
and then losing that, too, as I move
from room to bone-white room
in the house of the rest of my life.
~Sue Ellen Thompson
As the guests arrive at our son’s party
they gather in the living room—
short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to another
How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their
throats a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you
up, a seven says to a six,
the midnight cake, round and heavy as a
turret behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.
We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats
like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.
~Sharon Olds
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
~Margaret Atwood
Dear Sirs:
I have been enjoying the law and order of our
community throughout the past three months since
my wife and I, our two cats, and miscellaneous
photographs of the six grandchildren belonging to
our previous neighbors (with whom we were very
close) arrived in Saratoga Springs which is clearly
prospering under your custody
Indeed, until yesterday afternoon and despite my
vigilant casting about, I have been unable to discover
a single instance of reasons for public-spirited concern,
much less complaint
You may easily appreciate, then, how it is that
I write to your office, at this date, with utmost
regret for the lamentable circumstances that force
my hand
Speaking directly to the issue of the moment:
I have encountered a regular profusion of certain
unidentified roses, growing to no discernible purpose,
and according to no perceptible control, approximately
one quarter mile west of the Northway, on the southern
side
To be specific, there are practically thousands of
the aforementioned abiding in perpetual near riot
of wild behavior, indiscriminate coloring, and only
the Good Lord Himself can say what diverse soliciting
of promiscuous cross-fertilization
As I say, these roses, no matter what the apparent
background, training, tropistic tendencies, age,
or color, do not demonstrate the least inclination
toward categorization, specified allegiance, resolute
preference, consideration of the needs of others, or
any other minimal traits of decency
May I point out that I did not assiduously seek out
this colony, as it were, and that these certain
unidentified roses remain open to viewing even by
children, with or without suitable supervision
(My wife asks me to append a note as regards the
seasonal but nevertheless seriously licentious
phenomenon of honeysuckle under the moon that one may
apprehend at the corner of Nelson and Main
However, I have recommended that she undertake direct
correspondence with you, as regards this: yet
another civic disturbance in our midst)
I am confident that you will devise and pursue
appropriate legal response to the roses in question
If I may aid your efforts in this respect, please
do not hesitate to call me into consultation
Respectfully yours,
~June Jordan
You sit in a chair, touched by nothing, feeling
the old self become the older self, imagining
only the patience of water, the boredom of stone.
You think that silence is the extra page,
you think that nothing is good or bad, not even
the darkness that fills the house while you sit watching
it happen. You’ve seen it happen before. Your friends
move past the window, their faces soiled with regret.
You want to wave but cannot raise your hand.
You sit in a chair. You turn to the nightshade spreading
a poisonous net around the house. You taste
the honey of absence. It is the same wherever
you are, the same if the voice rots before
the body, or the body rots before the voice.
You know that desire leads only to sorrow, that sorrow
leads to achievement which leads to emptiness.
You know that this is different, that this
is the celebration, the only celebration,
that by giving yourself over to nothing,
you shall be healed. You know there is joy in feeling
your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen future,
so you wait, you stare and you wait, and the dust settles
and the miraculous hours of childhood wander in darkness.
~Mark Strand
Inside the bell jar of the glass factory,
the girls bend over conveyor belts, lean
into kilns, bobbing like birds diving for fish.
One taps a finished porthole window
with a small silver hammer and
pronounces it sound (outside
a woodpecker smashes its beak
into a whitebirch, searching for sap).
One girl runs her finger down the seam
of a serving plate (outside floodwater
makes a mirror of the meadow).
Another girl holds a thermometer
up to the light (the sun has inched up
a few degrees and yes, Monday has a fever).
Another dips her finger into
a beaker of water and tests
that each goblet in the set sings
a successive note in an E minor scale—
six notes the other girls know so well
that at night, in the dormitory,
one or all of them can be heard
hum-dreaming the song in their sleep.
Since they’re not allowed outside—
never have been, never will be—
they used to watch rainstorms
like television, cross-legged, wiping
the glass if their breath fogged
the view. They used to exclaim
over drops of dew. They used to
run their fingers along the walls,
searching for a way out, but that only
smeared the sky. At break they lie
on their stomachs in the sunroom,
where they’ve stacked a wall of cracked
glass hands. Looking through it is the closest
they come to touching the things they see—
the horizon a lifeline across one palm,
the pine trees in the distance like
bonsai in tiny finger terrariums.
Moving things—foxes and half-moons—
slink in and out of adjacent wrists,
slide under successive glass fingernails.
Once a stag walked past and scraped
its antlers along the glass wall.
They all gasped. It was the closest
they had ever come to another body.
Now as if their skull walls had
windows and each brain were
a clear, crystalline thing, the synapses
making temporary chandeliers
of thought-sparks in the brain’s
blank sky, they are all having
the same idea at the same time—
to make a girl out of glass.
The sketches start out simple, but soon
one girl proposes a glass voicebox
strung with glass chimes, another petitions
for porthole pupils, a fringe of glass
lashes on each eyelid’s hinge, another
imagines a mouth made of powdered
glass and crinkle enamel, and off they go.
Not one finger here has ever felt fur,
seen veins or bones except under
the cover of skin, but they bypass
all that with the force of their dreaming—
how best to make her glass hair seem to
stream down her back, whose forefinger
they should choose to dent in her dimples.
The thermometer hits one thousand
degrees and suddenly she’s standing there—
hot, glowing, almost still liquid. Like them,
but unlike too. They don’t question that
she is alive, walking, gesturing. But no one
imagined that she, with her new glass eyes
would be able to see the glass lock
and the glass key. In an instant, she opens
the door and they stream outside into
the solid world. This isn’t at all what
they imagined. The sky is like lead
above their heads. The once-silent birds
flood their ears with clashing arias.
All the puddles on the path are blurred
with mud. The glass girl disappears
and they don’t go after her. When they finally
reach the forest—it is miles further
than they imagined—the air inside is hazy
with dust and spores. They can’t see much
beyond their fingers. A bear or maybe
a deer thuds by. When they come upon
a stream, for a moment they brighten:
the light prances on its surface like the prisms
they make in the factory, but they can’t
see through to the fish, or the shadows
of fish flitting along the river floor.
Weeks later, they are back in the factory,
busily pouring bright liquids from
one beaker to another, sliding barefoot
between kiln, conveyor belt, workshop.
Then sleep. In her dreams, the girl who
has begun building a glass owl
from the inside-out, starting with
its morning meal of mouse, will invent
a formula for flight. Another is designing
a glass ladder where each rung has
a different horizon hidden inside.
The glass girl could be anywhere.
She could be just outside, watching
or she could be worlds away, and truly,
they like it that way. In the hot afternoon,
the girls melt into various poses by
the glass walls, molding their memories
of the outside world into newer, clearer forms.
One taps a finished porthole window
with a small silver hammer and pronounces it
sound. One runs her finger down the seam
of a serving plate. Another holds a thermometer
horizontally, and uses its markings to measure
the height of the trees. The mercury inside
shivers in the newly imagined breeze.
~Matthea Harvey
