POETRY
FIELD GUIDE TO THE BEARS OF NEW JERSEY by John Bargowski
Some people in the party store on 519 swear
he swam over from the Pennsy side
to poke around for leftovers
after the Community Day pig roast and clam bake
then settled‑in to worry our small dogs and stay-at-home moms.
Others blame the wranglers
at the circus that passed through this summer,
claim they left his cage door open
after he stopped catching the striped balls
the trained monkeys threw at him
and refused to ride his two-wheeler
three times around the ring
for a pat on the head and a bite of week-old
lard biscuit dipped in bacon fat.
I saw him there this past August, under the Big Top,
crouched over his little cycle,
sporting a plaid fedora slumped low
as the faded one my uncle wore
when he came home after doing his stretch
of hard time in Rahway.
Three hundred pounds or more, and well over six feet
when standing on two legs,
the Lenape would’ve called him m’kwah,
man-god.
Never mind his oversize mitts and foul mouthful
of yellowed teeth,
I still would’ve liked to sneak past the gates,
heard him growl his story at the guards.
Lately he’s been spotted in the Garrett’s trash bin,
the big clown, flat on his back,
slurping the last drops from Yuengling empties
and tossing them out on Johnny’s lawn.
The State says they can’t do anything about him
unless he becomes a repeat offender,
recommends local wives lock‑up their dogs
and cats, send their husbands out
after each rain to piss on their refuse cans
to break him from going house to house
checking for unlocked doors,
or turning over garbage cans to chew‑up
those blood–soaked sponges
glued to the bottoms of packaged chicken.
My uncle couldn’t keep his nose clean either,
knew his way around Colt 38’s and hotel safes,
like m’kwah, he must’ve forgotten
how to tear through rotting stumps and root
for bark beetles and wriggling white grubs,
so after his long stretch in the pen,
there were people standing outside in the snow
who wanted him too
to wear a numbered tag in his ear
and a collar around his neck.
John Bargowski’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and The Gettysburg Review. Bordighera Press published his collection Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway in a bilingual English-Italian edition in 2012.
SCAT by Nicky Beer
On the Sangre de Cristo trails
we found brazen, chalky discards,
the devoured bones turned to pressed powder
in the sun – the predator’s signal
to its kind: here I am. This morning,
the spume of flies had drawn us
to the drying jumble outside the cabin
door. Stippled with indigo
berry seeds, matted fronds
of hair warped and whorled the leavings.
Tightly-wrapped bindle of hunger
that I poked and skewered with twigs,
as if I’d expected to find a fully-intact
murine glare: take a picture, etc.
I remember unscrambling the stories
buried in the owls’ pellets,
a diagram of voles’ bones grubbily taped
to my grade-school desk. No one
was ready to let Will Kiernan forget
how the rank tributary of diarrhea
had escaped the yellow poly hem
of his gym shorts during the spelling test
even though he’d begged Mrs. Ligouri
for a hall pass. Poor Shit Willie,
who crashed on the expressway
junior year a few weeks after
Denise had let him go to third.
And I told him I’d kill him if he told anyone,
she’d wept. I’d thought about killing
the goddamned hospice nurse
with the bad back when she called me
to the hospital bed in the living
room to help lift my mother
off the bedpan, my mother, who then took
my hand in hers, oversoft and moth-
colored, and raised it to her lips.
But it wasn’t enough to make me forgive
the nurse, because Ma had already had enough
taken from her without seeing me
turn my head when her gown rode up.
And even though I’d grimaced
at the pile your old dog dropped,
as I knelt in the baked crabgrass
and for the first time closed my bagged hand
around the stinking warmth, I saw
the years ahead of us as certainly
as he’d pulled me back home . . .
Whatever had looked in the wide glass
last night must have scented the mineral spatter
you’d sprawled across my belly,
cooled to scales as we dozed
in the leathered bulk of the sectional.
Only you could know that when
I say that rabbits will eat
the black cabochons of their own
turds – to ensure not a single nutrient
has been lost – I am talking love.
The glittering green-red bolide
that cleaved the sky for a few strange seconds,
searing the constellations we’d never learned
to name on that vast and empty plain –
only you could have known that
I would have opened my mouth to it
again and again.
For Brian
Nicky Beer is the author of The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015) and The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010).
GOAT’S MILK by Todd Davis
The bells up and down the ridges
wander through the small window
in the kitchen wall. The girl who makes soap
and fudge from goat’s milk to sell to tourists
who come for the fall foliage is trying to describe
for her mother, who is deaf, what it sounds like
when she slides her fingers along the slick udder
and milk spurts from the goat’s nipple.
She makes no mention of the goat kid
they found mostly eaten in the rocks, how she
took the bell from around its neck and washed
the blood from the shiny metal with the hose
at the side of the house. Her father and brother
want to kill the coyote that did this, and part of her
wants that, too. She forms words with her hands,
gestures to her mother, and says with silent lips
the word red, because milk sounds alive to her,
and next the words water and stone, because the stream
running from the woods and into their pasture
resembles the clattering of hooves. The last word
she mouths, wrists turning over the expression
like needles knitting wool, is risk, the swish-
swish of milk circling the bottom of the pail,
a single goat neglected by her brother
who brought the herd from the far meadow,
the parting of grass as a paw pads
the soft turf, and the bleat from the back
of a goat’s throat, moaning first out of hunger,
then out of fear.
Todd Davis is the author of five full-length collections of poetry: Winterkill (Michigan State University Press, 2016); In the Kingdom of the Ditch (Michigan State University Press, 2013); The Least of These (Michigan State University Press, 2010); Some Heaven (Michigan State University Press, 2007); and Ripe (Bottom Dog Press, 2002).
EDENIC by Michael Homolka
Flaming forth
with the red eye of Ra
Adam slices his
toe by mistake
and drips onto a vine
late afternoon
around when all
the chlorophyll goes dark
Doctors are regarded
then as now so one is not
needless to say called
Every possible opportunity
Eve and the serpent
make love in a forest
of plum-filled clouds
and dark pink plastic
floaty toys she’s what
at most fourteen
or one-hundred thirty-eight
for those more
literal-minded
The act’s not yet
quite out of bounds
and Adam doesn’t
understand anyway
amid his triangular
stacks of Mexican Coke
and dealings
with early trade routes
of West Palm Beach
(God flipped him a fine
but uni-dimensional
intellect like a
tiddlywink into a hopper)
till vague forces of modernity
begin to creep
up like redwoods
from the deep end
of a shallow pool
in a lower middle
class backyard
A deity less concerned
with mercy than with majesty
the expulsed pair
begin to bandy about
wandering toward
the perspectival twilight
Eve has hung onto
a bit of vine sends half
back to the serpent
relaxing in that newly
minted Negev dust
Remember and taste
she has written below
Anyway it was never
about Adam’s blood
but ours though they
don’t really bother again
and the rhythms
of that lost life wash over
each of their speechless
animal brains
God offers a strangely
approving nod as the
nonplussed sinners
(soon to be back
knocking bricks
downriver from the pyramids)
cross into the earliest
of the horizon’s
original cities
Heard to resonate
upon Bryce Canyon
Myrtle Beach the Pyrenees
Arrogant fucks
who finally betrayed me
They broke my leg
forgot my name
they stole my cable
Michael Homolka’s poems have appeared in publications such as Agni, Boulevard, The New Yorker, Parnassus, Ploughshares, and The Threepenny Review. His first full-length collection is Antiquity (Sarabande Books, 2016).
HOUSE by Charles Douthat
All of that which was to be was present there
we were all of us there we three children
for the first time our house-proud father
the doorkey trailing on a chain from his hand
our mother’s holding my younger brother’s
her minds-eye wandering room to room locating
a sofa here unrolling carpets there
tables and chairs arranged to last the year
or a lifetime as it happened five lifetimes
for there were five of us yes and no one but us
exploring the coved-ceiling strangeness
the heaviness of those plaster-walled rooms
the elegant rectangles of wan window-light
crossing the floors
we kids opened cupboards
drawers all empty as the ghostly thrumming
refrigerator was empty as if
no one had ever lived in this house before
cooked here or slept showered here or wept
though my sister doing her best Nancy Drew
insisted we search for a sign surely
someone left one or two telltales behind
we pulled off shoes half running half skating
in socks across chestnut-colored floors down
the t‑shaped hall to rooms that drew us in
like heroes as if it was honor to first
touch each closet’s wall-end to slide gamely
the cool yellow-tiled bathroom floor
nothing
we found nothing no washcloth in the tub
no white residues of soap at the sinks
no sign of any life but ours until mom
called us to the back bedroom pointed out
a small framed photo barely noticeable
against roses of a faded papered wall
dad lifted it from its nail brought the photo
low and we gathered to consider
the white-haired dark-suited man held at the waist
by a wrinkled smiling woman his arm
over the shoulder of a taller
younger man uniformed for war squinting
against the California sun they stood
beneath a stucco arch on the front porch
of this very house now our house
no way
to ask what happened to the photo
as it’s impossible for dad now to describe
the rest of that day or those following
when movers trucked us across town old house
to new so much is lost as it happens forever
two months after he died I pulled dad’s suits
from his closet removed each wood hanger
folded coats and trousers laid them in cartons
drove them to Goodwill how the suits smelled
of him and four years later I knelt
in the hall outside a bedroom where mom
lay dying I was sorting the sixty-year
clutter of family photos nestled in a drawer
it wouldn’t be long before I would take
what I wanted before I’d walk the bare floors
again with furniture sold off packed off gone
for old times sake I might take off my shoes
but which photos would I choose and of what
holiday from which decade so many
family faces topping navy blazers
and Easter dresses or floating above
a white-clothed Thanksgiving table
before
the house-sale closes should I prop one frame
on the mantle one picture to signify the lives
that rose and fell inside but what new owner
would care or care enough and afterwards
won’t shadows still follow me room to room won’t
the years still refuse to let go my hand
o what does it mean what can it possibly mean
to leave the past behind
Charles Douthat is the author of the poetry collection Blue for Oceans (New Haven Review Books, 2010). His poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac.
CONCRETE by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
is not as hard
nor as easy
as you think
see these old men
their barrows –
to the brim
raking soft
mud across
the wire mesh
how they work
the broad floats
folding and
stiffening
their crispyknee-
pads and long-
handled trowels
how they bow
and autumn
leaves
the air
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s poems have appeared in The Colorado Review, The Collagist, jubilat, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Mid-American Review. Her chapbook, Forking The Swift (CreateSpace), was published in 2010.
BEFORE THE FALL by Mercedes Lawry
Mr. Egg be one arrogant oval,
perching himself like that,
all high above the rest of us.
He be wearing that stupid grin
day in, day out. Don’t he know
his own precarious self?
Even wind could blow him down
and no one be weeping in the alleys.
Even a crooked little stick
come out of nowhere in the trees,
poke, poke, and knock him off his roost.
Even a sneaky green snake slither up
to find himself some sun and scare
that rotund fool into the wild blue yonder.
Who’s to say? Who’s to say?
King ain’t got no power over
a shell cracked to pieces, all that mess
can’t be scooped up to useful,
and no one be missing that biggity snob
and the way he jut himself into our noses
like he better than a loaf of bread and a pound of butter.
Mercedes Lawry is the author of two chapbooks: Happy Darkness (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and There are Crows in My Blood (Pudding House Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Natural Bridge, and Harpur Palate.
RED CANOE HAVING IDEAS by Jeanne Emmons
Last night she rocked
wildly in storm, and
now she is still, holding
water, open-hearted,
harboring in the red slit
of her body a bright,
leaf-shaped segment
of sky. She might be
a woman into whom
her lover has all night
again and again
poured himself,
so composed she is,
low in the water,
sleepy, smiling.
Jeanne Emmons has published three books of poetry: The Glove of the World (The Backwaters Press, 2006), Baseball Nights and DDT (Pecan Grove Press, 2005), and Rootbound (New Rivers Press, 1998). Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Carolina Quarterly, South Carolina Review, North American Review, and The River.
ALMOST EVERY TIME by Idea Vilariño
(translation by Jesse Lee Kercheval)
I know your tenderness
like the palm of my own hand.
Sometimes during sleep I remember it
as if I had already lost it.
Nearly all the nights
nearly all the times I fall asleep
at the same time as
you with your serious embrace confining me
encircling me
enveloping me in the warm cave of your sleep
and supporting my head on your shoulder
CASI TODAS LAS VECES by Idea Vilariño
Conozco tu ternura
como la misma palma de mi mano.
A veces entre sueños la recuerdo
como si ya la hubiese perdido alguna vez.
Casi todas las noches
casi todas las veces que me duermo
en ese mismo instante
tú con tu grave abrazo me confinas
me rodeas
me envuelves en la tibia caverna de tu sueño
y apoyas mi cabeza sobre tu hombro.
Idea Vilariño (18 August 1920–28 April 2009) was a Uruguayan poet and the author of twelve books of poetry. Among the best known are Nocturnos (1955) and Poemas de amor (1957). Her book of collected poems, Poesía completa, was published in Uruguay in 2009.
THE RED SUITCASE by Cynthia Marie Hoffman
You had a doll in a red suitcase but don’t remember. Your mother remembers. She is standing at the dark window where the trees glow faintly in the light that reaches them from the kitchen. Her reflection haunts the forest wearing her green robe. My memory’s going, she says. Beneath the basement stairs, a spider waits for you, laying out a silver wig for your hair. The garage is a chilled lake seeping up through your slippers. A chill climbs your arm from beneath the bed. The doorknobs turn. The doorknobs turn. You are going to remember. Nights, the red suitcase swings open. Rising from among her burial dresses, a flash of the doll’s boney cheek. You get up. Shelves in the closet. Shelves in the study. Shelves in the garage. Your arms grow feathery with dust. Somewhere her unbending feet. Somewhere the tiny laces of her shoes weaving into the air like vines growing wild in some forgotten garden. Close your eyes, she comes to you. She floats from the shelf dragging her hair behind her. In the window, the ghost of your mother stares directly into your mother’s eyes. The suitcase is a hard red bird winging past. You can see it happening in your mind’s eye, in the dark of night.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Paper Doll Fetus (Persea, 2014) and Sightseer (Persea, 2011), and the chapbook Her Human Costume (Gold Line Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Fence, jubilat, Blackbird, and The Journal.
WHAT REMAINS by Margaret Levine
A mother yells
at her little girl
who has put a damp
bathing suit
on the dresser –
calling her stupid
or bad. The dresser
is long gone now,
the mother too.
Margaret Levine’s poems have appeared in The Quarterly, Open City, and the anthology 180 More, edited by Billy Collins.
WEEPING GLASS by Susan Rich
In the Victoria and Albert Museum a 17th century wineglass
displays early signs of instability –
a breath of silver smoke
lingers along the opening of the mouth –
one rogue layer of iridescence.
Imagine now the world’s unseen glass objects,
forgotten in museum basements –
vessels, mosaics, flowers –
with ghost traces of fine lines.
Include picture frames leaning in catalogued stacks –
so many oils and watercolor, early photographs,
lithographs, pastels.
Weeping Glass, the curator calls it,
caused by chemical imbalances.
An affected edge begins to cloud,
then bead, then tiny slivered lines:
runes we no longer know how to read.
The art pieces start to fracture
each community declaring its losses.
Like the nearly lost fragments of a life
which insist upon themselves
each morning before the sleeper awakes –
They are staging their own protest.
Like citizens, who in the thousands,
crossed the Brooklyn Bridge just yesterday
for Eric Garner, Michael Brown –
like voices and cut glass –
like our unclaimed memory through shards of history
as we transform the cracks to light.
Susan Rich is the author of four collections of poetry from White Pine Press: Cloud Pharmacy (2014), The Alchemist’s Kitchen (2010), Cures Include Travel (2006), and The Cartographer’s Tongue (2000).
TO GUILT by Kurt Olsson
I carry you like my wallet everywhere:
before I leave I feel to check you’re still here.
Friend, you always are, you the currency
accepted in every one of my haunts and hideouts,
the credit card with no limits I pay off
inch by inch, never completely settling the tab.
Remember when we first met?
It must have been when I was a baby and I
could hear mother crying in the other room.
She knew you, too, better than I did of course, but hers
was different than mine: you. What I was doing
to make mother cry I don’t know, except I know
you must. You always do. You’ve followed ever since,
synonymous shadow that can’t stop limping
after me. I bought you suits, took you
to dances and dark alleys and drama classes, taught you
yourself in Russian in which you were already
fully fluent. Some mornings I wake and imagine
you’re gone, caput, at last. O sweet luck!
A whole day daydreaming you’ve found someone else.
I don’t mind you cheating, really, it’s okay,
but by nightfall, I can’t be without you
handing me something cool, rubbing the day’s dumb
out of my shoulders, cooking this rice, fish, and wasabi,
blackened sesame seeds so good I could cry.
Kurt Olsson is the author of the poetry collection What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Boulevard, Antioch Review, FIELD, and The Threepenny Review.
GETTING THROUGH THE A’s IN ANGELS:
THEIR NAMES AND MEANINGS by Tina Kelley
There are angels for separating the soul from the body at death,
angels who invented carousels and all the new French fashions.
There’s one just for the 26th of each month, for honey, sexuality.
Aban is your guardian ten months before death, another protects
fifth children. In heaven’s meadows upon meadows, one angel
governs confusion, one does nothing at all til the second coming,
one rules warm winds. The keeper of fiery triplicities seduces
the regent of Wednesdays, and they’re all new every morning,
born through every Godbreath, created by each fresh human sin.
They knit cotton breasts for cancer survivors, telling corny jokes.
They feather insights to the bored, quietly advise on cars to buy.
One’s pregnant with death, one protects finches, but none felt like
mine, until I spotted a green sea turtle, blunt and kindly, slowly
lifting its arms in hosannas to the quicksilver surface shining down.
Tina Kelley is the author of two collections of poetry: Precise (Word Press, 2013) and The Gospel of Galore (Word Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poetry East, Southwest Review, and Prairie Schooner.
ON SEEING THE EMBROIDERER, OR METTE GAUGUIN by Nancy Chen Long
After the divorce, I took a class in art appreciation
to occupy my head. We studied Gauguin.
While everyone else was taken in by his use of color
and image after image of nude Tahitian beauties,
I couldn’t stop staring at his wife Mette, embroidering.
I’d seen it before, as a painting of a woman
in obedient domesticity.
Now, she was a wife in situ, posing
while her husband withheld the sun
to blot out her face. He rendered her featureless.
She became more mask, a quiet interruption
in the wallpaper. Instead of needlepoint,
I started to imagine that she would have wanted
to leave, stroll down the banks of the Seine,
smolder along the soot-like evening,
reclaiming that textured glow some of us feel
as we fall under the whitewash of summer.
I scarcely glanced at the other paintings,
those fine features of Tehamana –
the Tahitian who became, at fourteen, mother
of Gauguin’s youngest son, whom he named Emile,
after his oldest son Emile, who lived in France
with Mette. The day Mette learned of his pubescent
other-bride must have been trauma,
the way it is when you learn of a husband’s lover,
the way it is when a girl comes to your home
on a Sunday afternoon in August
while you’re outside gardening
and you think it odd
that the dog seems to know her
as he trots up the driveway to greet her,
and the weight of summer humidity
has caused you to be slushed in sweat
and you smile politely as she approaches.
Nancy Chen Long is the author of the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Bat City Review, Pleiades, Superstition Review, DIAGRAM, and Mason’s Road.
VERMEER: THE LACEMAKER by Joan I. Siegel
Light shines through her face
warms her hands
lacing silk.
The absolute stillness
as though it were
an act of devotion:
how a woman’s fingers
tweeze a splinter from a child’s foot
touch a man’s body
shut the eyes of the dead.
Joan I. Siegel is the author of three collections of poetry: The Fourth River (Shabda Press, 2015), Light at Point Reyes (Shabda Press, 2012), and Hyacinth for the Soul (Deerbrook Editions, 2009).
MONET’S WATERLOO BRIDGE, PASTEL, 1901 by Nicole Pekarske
The bridge is a cloud, and the towers of power stations
beyond it are clouds. A world for cloud-people or,
if you believe it, angels with golden harps.
This world is blue, the lowest notes of a flute.
No one lies here. It is impossible,
with only the barest distinction
between sky and stone, self
and river. This is a world of glass faces.
The fine edge of seeing, one step removed from white light,
the birth of focus, the eye almost innocent,
unfallen. The delight of that first breath,
the cool of the first shadow. Not yet day,
this is inviolate, with room for every part of you,
every part of you right as air.
Nicole Pekarske is the author of the collection Intermissa, Venus (Cherry Grove Editions, 2004). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, New York Quarterly, and Poet Lore.
AS CALIFORNIA EDGES TOWARDS ALASKA by Colette Inez
Long after the Belgian Sisters gave me leave
to sail the sea, green on a pull-down map,
Joyce popped open a bottle in San Diego
to celebrate my poem, “The Pope’s Valet.”
My father served the church, fell to his knees,
covered his face with his hands in prayer
and never broke with Rome to give me his name.
Some days I feel my father’s soul streaming west
where my friend, Joyce, ran out of mornings.
We may all meet as particles of time.
California to break away into Alaskan coastal mountains,
interlocked plates over landmass sprawled across the globe,
and the green sea sailing above
whatever we contended with and remembered.
Colette Inez is the author of eleven poetry collections including The Luba Poems (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Horseplay (Word Press, 2011).
HOMESICKNESS by Judith Skillman
In the kitchen
I have water, bells, a candle.
I have a man in the living room
reading from a screen
he holds in his hand.
Outside the sun
lights paper birches.
A sky of ultramarine
brushes the rooftops
in this town so small
everyone knows the mayor’s
DUI’s, the young woman
with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Upstairs I have a bed,
a quilt, a book. Light shines
through cotton curtains.
My bad dreams may
come true, or sleep
could leave me with just
the shadows under my eyes
and the sin of overstatement,
as when the kettle blows
its top, or the idea
of tomorrow ushers in
another yesterday.
Judith Skillman’s most recent collection is House of Burnt Offerings (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Seneca Review, FIELD, The Iowa Review, and Poetry.
THREE TIMES ON THE TRAIL, I LOOKED BACK FOR YOU by Kate Partridge
At the corner where the pines beam
with Christmas bulbs,
it began snowing,
and the next turn, the sky went blue.
I had almost forgotten
the darkness, how it smolders
with depth. Say weight. Say raven. It vanished
just as quickly – gray an incantation
over the brush
and hillside, snow gray, lung gray, ice terse
across the rink, ice plating the inlet.
Say it another way.
The water pooling thin lakes above
your collarbone, steam rising into
the towels, soft
scrape of your skis laying track
along the path behind me.
Kate Partridge is the author of the chapbook Intended American Dictionary (MIEL Books, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, and Passages North.
SUMMER APPLES by Cathryn Essinger
I planted an apple tree in memory
of my mother, who is not gone,
but whose memory has become
so transparent that she remembers
slicing apples with her grandmother
(yellow apples; blue bowl) better than
the fruit that I hand her today. Still,
she polishes the surface with her thumb,
holds it to the light and says with no
hesitation, Oh, Yellow Transparent . . .
they’re so fragile, you can almost see
to the core. She no longer remembers how
to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but
her desire is clear – it is pie that she wants.
And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core –
to that little cathedral to memory – where
the seeds remember everything they need
to know to become yellow and transparent.
Cathryn Essinger is the author of three collections of poetry: What I Know About Innocence (Main Street Rag, 2009), My Dog Does Not Read Plato (Main Street Rag, 2004), and A Desk in the Elephant House (Texas Tech University Press,1998). Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Antioch Review, Poetry, New England Review, and Quarterly West.
Mildred’s Pancake Village by Mark Kraushaar
We’d watched the daughter
hold the door and take his arm.
But it was the old man himself, poly pants,
plaid cap, the old man who led her by the Ladies,
past the coat rack to each of three
full booths along the window.
Leaning over, Oh,
you’re Ned Janes, he’d say, we worked
at Allis Chalmers on the tractor line.
You’re Nancy Platt, you lived
next door on Hauser Avenue, and you,
you bought my blue bass boat with the Evinrude
because that was your brother crashed his
hotrod pick‑up by the Stop n’ Shop.
Of course, everybody nodded and everybody
grinned right back but his daughter, smiling too,
smiling and trying,
Oh Dad, she’d say, Oh, Dad,
and he’d turn and start all over:
You’re Burt Mancuso, You’re Dean Zell,
you’re Max Fraze, I knew your dad at Gardner Creosote.
It was winter and Lisa was with me.
When we’d eaten and paid, we stepped
into that sun-shot chilly afternoon, blinky and quiet,
and I remember how the pavement moved beneath us,
grey and affirming, and how this,
even this, was a comfort.
Mark Kraushaar is the author of the poetry collections The Uncertainty Principle (Waywiser Press, 2012) and Falling Brick Kills Local Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Hudson Review, Poetry Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Best American Poetry.