At the Zoo, Again

Look at that beautiful bear, a woman says. The bear paces and paces a small cement ledge, then stands still, looks out with unfocused, deep-set eyes. My daughter waves and I feel sadder still. I can’t explain it’s not a pet.

The otter is better: It runs over the rocks, then dives. Silver bubbles cling to its back behind the aquarium window. A girl shakes a leafy branch, the otter chases it, the children laugh and run after. A black-haired toddler wants to see; he wants me to lift him. I’d spotted him earlier, by the tiger, strapped into a stroller. His spiked hair matched his dad’s, his sad eyes matched the bear’s. I hadn’t noticed his fingers were fused into flippers. Now, he smiles at me with his whole face. He raises his arms to me again. I move to lift him but suddenly his mother appears and thanks me, and I haven’t done anything.

Sleeping Bear

I climb the dune’s highest hill. I want to fly away home. Up here, it’s quiet and breezy. Slowly, a toy boat draws a white line across Glen Lake. My heart calms. The people who climb after me have not hurt each other. Campers stream off a blue school bus, then wobble in canoes near shore. Though I know they must be singing, I can’t hear the song.

Published in a limited-edition broadside by The Michigan Poet in November 2011.

Miriam Green

The List

It is Friday and Abe takes out the list he wrote last night. “Write list,” he mumbles, “done. Buy tomatoes. Done.” He takes the pen he always carries in his breast pocket and uses it to carefully cross off Write List and Buy Tomatoes. He surveys the list. Make Soup. Clean up Living room. Fix Toilet. Eat Breakfast. Look in Garden. Wash Dishes. Emma enters the room and notices that Abe is looking at his list. “What,” she asks, “is on your list today? “Oh, Make Soup. Clean up Living room. Fix Toilet. Eat Breakfast. Look in Garden. Wash Dishes,” he says. Emma wants him to add something. “Can you add something?” she asks. “That depends,” Abe replies. “What does it depend on?” Emma asks. The list, she notices, is in Abe’s hands. He is leaning on one foot, and his body is sloped to the left. She wonders if Abe depends on the list or the list depends on him. “It depends on the list,” Abe answers. “If the list is too crowded, I can’t add it. If the list is not too crowded, you can rest assured I’ll add it.” Emma thinks longingly of her bed wondering how crowded it will be when she takes her nap. Just then, she knocks over the tall glass of milk she is holding. “Quick,” she cries, “help me clean up this milk before it spoils all our lists.” Abe looks at his list. “It’s not on the list,” he says. “Well, what if you help me and then put it on the list,” sobs Emma. She’s gathered several towels and is mopping the counter where their lists are piled. “I don’t know.” Abe is squirming. “What if I add it right now and then help you?” “That will work,” sniffles Emma. Abe takes his pen and writes, Clean up Spilled Milk. Then he helps Emma clean up the spilled milk. Then he takes his pen and crosses off Clean up Spilled Milk. He puts the list and pen in his breast pocket. “Can the list overlook emergency non-listed events?” asks Emma. “That depends,” says Abe. “What does it depend on?” asks Emma. “I’ll let you know,” Abe responds, “when I look in the garden.”

From a series entitled “Abe and Emma Play House”

Cameron Witbeck

Pluck

She wants to change her name to Nightingale and live in Vienna’s oaks. She pulls all the tissues from the box to make the bout of her practice violin. The living room, strewn with feathers, and she’s learning cursive, so she lets the pen pull smooth across the page. See how close they are? Violin and loving? She practices movement, follows the names of rubber band chords from bridge to scroll. Soon, she’ll get a bow. She wants to use her own hair, but he loves it and tells her so. She waits for an open window, for her learning to begin, for his hands flitting to somewhere she doesn’t understand, his voice on the chin rest of her neck. Little bird, this is how you sing.

Gail Goepfert

When Love Leaves

She relies on ritual, slips an arm into a favorite ruffled pink blouse, mists her scent, Light Blue, at throat and wrist, counts to 13 each time she ascends, descends the stairs but she forgets

to light the lamps in darkened rooms, leaves the towels undried in the washer, reads and rereads the first paragraph on the page, unblinking watches the wipers slap in the chill of the slanting rain. There is no comfort as the pears mellow in the orchard or the dogwood boughs post signs of spring, as words of admiration, luscious, ambrosial — waft her way.

She did not imagine that the need would exist, but her ears seek harsh sounds — repulsive, despicable, acrid. She orders Thai takeout, his favorite; she tosses it outside the restaurant before she takes a roundabout way home. She learns what it was to envy unburdened memory.

Jenny A. Burkholder

Dorothy

In my new red high heels, a Rolex with a face of a hundred tiny diamonds, and my new black leather dress snuggled around my hips, I plan to smoke three cigarettes. First one I’ll light with a plastic Bic lighter, rough around the edges from opening too many beer tops, and inhale deeply. The sky, really the lid of a jigsaw puzzle box, breaks apart into two hundred and fifty pieces. I’m going to click my heels and sing. Not the song that you would think, though. Because I am feeling artsy, I’ll call it “World Crumble.” And as I am crossing and uncrossing my legs, checking the red spot above my knee, I may engage in some idle chitchat with a young skateboarder who sits next to me. His wallet dangles from a chain at his belt loop, and he wears a beat up T-shirt of some now defunct rock band. He’s too young to smoke, but he plucks a cigarette out from behind my ear like a magician and lights it up for me. Who am I to say stop? I wistfully blow smoke down Kedzie Avenue, watching the old men of Humboldt Park disappear in its haze. These men, the sentries of this fairy tale, their worn grooves our sidewalk, guard my friend and me. We trade our own stories of bravery until it’s past his curfew. This is when I light up my third cigarette. Everything is different when smoking your last; there’s a finality and reassurance that the world is whole and beautiful, right like a flagpole. And I am different, more relaxed and watery, my own reflection heartening me.

Philip Smith

The Way

When a man walks slowly enough his footsteps become the way. They leave a little trail that other slowly moving men can pick up and follow. These other men's footsteps may also become the way. But who but a woman could walk so slow? Men bring flowers to women because women do not give bees to men.

Leaves and dust and the dark and the neighbor's big screen TV that you watch through your bedroom window. There are tiny footprints smearing your window. They make the foreheads of the people on TV look like melted plastic flowers. A buzzing in your room detaches itself from the appliances and makes a warm spot in your bed. A little indentation as though she were just here, and left.

Stefanie Marlis

moon

Beyond a bird calling from a willow tree, above an etched redwood, above the ridge — platinum, waning, a slice, just a shaving, gone from your right side, you call, too, to anyone who glances at the sky, what do you mean to us when you look like this — that change is coming, that we can't hang onto the bird's song or exactly what is meant by angle of incidence or the silence between?

We didn't escape in cars at night

My father bought beater cars from police auctions, which is how I discovered the small muscles that keep a shoulder together. These were long-nosed rusty animals with heavy doors that had to be slammed to stay shut, running a few months then laid to rest while dad worked up to admitting defeat. He spent weekends with his head under the hood. I learned all the local bus routes and protocol for hitching rides. None of us four kids got a driver's license when we turned sixteen, and I didn't take an interest in Springsteen until I was almost thirty.

Yvette Managan

Desire

What I have left of desire I place in a shoebox, along with the photographs of you yesterday, when we were young and stupid and sweet, our hands kept not on our own bodies as admonished, but as free ranging chickens and we pecked and cooed, shook tail feathers, roosted on each other's laps, scratched and nested.

I run through those pictures, gaze, turn my head, gaze with the other eye. If I hid my head under a wing instead of getting ruffled feathers, if I'd have known the pecking order, I'd still wear desire on my breast — proud and cocky. I know that now, down flutters in a breeze, I shake my comb, drop my hackles, let go, let it go, scratch, peck, dig for food, abandon eggs, unfertilized, scrounge for worms, brood.

Instructions

The bookcase came in the mail. Assembly required. The pieces were made from a rare tree in Southeast Asia according to the photocopied brochure. The instructions were translated into English from 13th century Norse by a cartwright in Tajikistan. We may as well have been trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. No matter what we did, with or with out the guidance of the instructions, it turned out to look like a coffin. So we buried it in the backyard. The following spring we noticed the shoots of a tree coming out of the ground. By fall, we had a full-grown artificial tree that resembled some rare tree in Southeast Asia. It was deciduous, and all the thin wire veins in the fallen silky leaves spelled THIS SIDE UP.

Vamos a Uruguay
A Prose Poem That Has No Connection to the Spanish film ¡Ay, Carmela!

I run into my wife in a bookstore, in the Fiction section. We ask each other how we've been, as if we haven't seen in each other in years rather than the twenty minutes since arriving. I'm tired and want to go home, but she's dying to go to Uruguay. "The Travel section's over by the cafe," I tell her. A woman shelving books in the Mythology section pops her head around the corner — all I can see is one eye — and asks if she can help. "No," I say, "I'm just telling my wife where to go."

Later, at home, I ask my wife, "Would you like the glass of water on the table?" and she asks me what I mean.

Summer Rental, More Rain

Must, mildew rise, greet cousins as they pry open the attic, classic board games: Sorry, Risk, Trouble, Life. They kneel before the TV, a holdover from the '70s, its mahogany console growing from the scratched floor, its gold-capped legs thick as billy clubs. CNN reports on rockets overseas, exploding in night vision like bee balm, fireworks. Faces glow a mutant green. Volume is a crapshoot on this set, nonexistent tonight, so we gauge precision, proximity by the degree to which the picture shakes: Parkinson's tremors versus grand mal seizures. Bombs blister the Mideast, again, again, again, burrowing into baking earth, a distant land, another sandy peninsula. On this shrinking shore, half a world away, fossils, driftwood sprout in flowerbeds; siblings fight over Chance cards, deeds, a silver shoe; in-laws seek refuge in this sinking rental, leaking in their desert lives.

Summer Rental, Leaking Roof

A puddle grows on the kitchen ceiling. My brother-in-law Juan loosens the light fixture, washes the rainwater, flies collecting in this globe down the drain. With our forever damp dishtowel, I wipe off this bowl, dragging my fingers over its raised surface, its yellowing bumps — like a starfish, I think, or the hours of an oversized wristwratch set in Braille. I remember school days, being taught to read A Duck Is a Duck, faces, maps in relief. But in these drops that now pool in dirty dishes, splash white porcelain walls, roll underground, away, I find no meaning, no Morse code, neither key nor legend, just the tap-tap-tapping of scattered showers funneled through the cracks between shingles, plywood, two by fours, distilled into the softening sounds of second hands, summer, silence.