There Ought to Be a Manual

It’s like the first time someone who is not your mother sees you

naked. Because you don’t know, do you, if all your parts

are in the right place, shaped and sized appropriately, according

to convention?—because your mother would never tell you,

which means there you are, pulling down your pants over

what might well be a preposterous ass. So, to my point,

you don’t know, likewise, what to do, how to be, at these grown-up

parties, so much depending on first impressions, decisions

about where to sit, what to drink, how long and loud to laugh

at pretty much everything, as far as you can tell, whether anyone

has noticed the fear-sweat creeping up the small of your large back

and pooling in environmentally catastrophic oil spills under

each arm. Or how, when you leave the party ten minutes

after arriving and return home, you confront, equally unprepared,

the task of “putting down” your dog—will it be like it is

for the Kentucky Derby winner who breaks his million-dollar

leg after crossing the line? or like the farmer who takes his shotgun

and the children’s 4-H pig out behind the barn?—this dog

who can only look up at you, these days, as you come in the door,

who doesn’t pant anymore so much as rattle, who has seen

your ass, listened to you laugh long and loud at Julia Child

pummeling the pastry dough, who has a thousand times taken you

outside for a little sun, and who has always given it to you

straight—like yesterday, when he told you that one of you needed

to grow a pair, and since you had taken his, it fell to you,

he said, to figure out how it was meant be done, how death

for one could be brought about, how going on, for the other.

(first published in Gloom Cupboard, 2016)

You Know This One By Heart

It will start as the sort of love poem

you know by heart, with the young

couple waist-deep in the ocean, en-

twined, and then work its way around

to a day at the park, throwing

frisbees to their corgis and kids. Then,

not unexpectedly—you will have seen

it coming—the requisite scene of vitriol

and recrimination. All you will need

are a few details about who was found

in whose pickup truck doing what

with whom, and you could write

the lines yourself. Where the poem

takes a turn, however, is when we see

the man, years later, walking in a forest

as if he knows it like the back of his hand,

kneeling to see the tiny vines of blue-

eyed marys growing alongside the trail,

when all at once a great horned owl rises,

so close the man’s hoary heart nearly

breaks in his chest, beating like wings.

(first published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, 2017)