by Mary Ruefle

Women who lie alone at midnight

because there is no one else to lie to

Women who lie alone at midnight

at noon in the laundromat

destroying their own socks

Women who lie alone at midnight:

Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates

Women who lie alone at midnight

as the first furl of starlight

pearls the moon with nacre

Women who lie alone at midnight

sending a postcard bearing

the face of a bawling infant

who cries “I am for the new”

Women who lie alone at midnight

reciting the names of shoes

Women who lie alone at midnight

spurting unjustified tears,

the kind that run sideways

never reaching the mouth,

the kind you cannot swallow

Women who lie alone at midnight

singing breast away the burden of my tender

and afterwards burp

Women who lie alone at midnight

obeying the laws of physics

Women who let their dreams curl at the end

Women in a monastery of flamingos

Women who die alone at midnight

contributing to the end, to

lost time, to the rain and flies,

seeing the bird they saw trapped in the airport

surviving by the water fountain

What’s more, try it sometime

It works

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Pietà

by Kevin Young

I hunted heaven

for him.

No dice.

Too uppity,

it was. Not enough

music, or dark dirt.

I begged the earth empty

of him. Death

believes in us whether

we believe

or not. For a long while

I watch the sound

of a boy bouncing a ball

down the block

take its time

to reach me. Father,

find me when

you want. I’ll wait.

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The Flurry

by Sharon Olds

When we talk about when to tell the kids,

we are so together, so concentrated.

I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m

the killer”—taking my wrist—he says,

holding it. He is sitting on the couch,

the old indigo chintz around him,

rich as a night sea with jellies,

I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him,

as if within some chamber of matedness,

some dust I carry around me. Tonight,

to breathe its Magellanic field is less

painful, maybe because he is drinking

a wine grown where I was born—fog,

eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m

sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch

my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want

to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that,

I tell him I will try to fall out of

love with him, but I feel I will love him

all my life. He says he loves me

as the mother of our children, and new troupes

of tears mount to the acrobat platforms

of my ducts and do their burning leaps.

Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for a

moment, I imagine a flurry

of tears like a whirra of knives thrown

at a figure, to outline it—a heart’s spurt

of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod

to it, it is my hope.

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Draw Near

by Scott Cairns

προσέλθετε

For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered

far to find. And near is where you’ll very likely see

how far the near obtains. In the dark katholikon

the lighted candles lent their gold to give the eye

a more than common sense of what lay flickering

just beyond the ken, and lent the mind a likely

swoon just shy of apprehension. It was then

that time’s neat artifice fell in and made for us

a figure for when time would slip free altogether.

I have no sense of what this means to you, so little

sense of what to make of it myself, save one lit glimpse

of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom.

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Soundings

by Robert Wrigley

The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired

to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post

of the shack. Two holes at the top—near where the stem was,

for a thong of leather to hang it by, which long ago broke—

are now the fingerholes of the mournful wind instrument it’s become.

The broad round bowl of it makes a sort of birdly

basso profundo that pearls through the steel, into the post,

the floor joists and walls in two notes: a slightly sharp D

and an equally sharp F, says the guitar tuner,

which explains why all my thinking these days

is in B-flat, a difficult key for all but the clarinet

and this sudden covey of nuthatches, whose collective woe

makes it a minor chord I am in the middle of.

Nothing to do but hoist such silks as the luff

of limbs and needles suggests, and sail on,

the barely-escaped-from-the-cat chipmunk chattering

like a gull, and the mountain’s last drift of snow

resembling the back of a sounding whale. Hear the thrum of the rigging,

Daggoo? Hear its profoundest woo, its sensible gobbledy-goo

and doo-wop, the boo-hoos of the spheres, by vectors and veers,

by tacks and refractal jabberings, taking us deeper into the weirdness

of the ghost sea those prairie hills were the bottom of once,

this nowhere we shall not be returning from.

Draw the lines! Assume the crow’s nest, Pip. This ship

sails on music and wind, and away with birds.

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Piano

by Dan Howell

Her wattled fingers can’t

stroke the keys with much

grace or assurance anymore,

and the tempo is always

rubato, halting, but still

that sound—notes quivering

and clear in their singularity,

filing down the hallway—

aches with pure intention, the

melody somehow prettier

as a remnant than

whatever it used to be.

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Head Handed

by Brenda Shaughnessy

Stop belonging to me so much, face-head.

Leave me to my child and my flowers.

I can’t run with you hanging on to me like that.

It’s like having ten dogs on a single lead

and no talent for creatures.

No hands, no trees. Not my dogs, nobody’s.

Don’t you have a place to go, face-head?

Deep into the brick basement of another life?

To kill some time, I mean. That furnace

light could take a shine to you.

There are always places, none of them mine.

And always time—rainbow sugar show

of jimmies falling from ice cream’s sky—

but that stuff’s extra, it’s never in supply.

“Never,” however, acres of it. Violet beans

and sarcasm. Too many flavors of it.

All those prodigal particles,

flimsily whimsical miracles, an embarrassment

of glitches. The chorus just more us.

But nowhere bare and slippery have I

got a prayer. If I had two hands

to rub together I wouldn’t waste the air.