a paradelle, a roundelay

Tess Gallagher

Maybe I’m seven in the open field—
the straw-grass so high
only the top of my head makes a curve
of brown in the yellow. Rain then.
First a little. A few drops on my
wrist, the right wrist. More rain.
My shoulders, my chin. Until I’m looking up
to let my eyes take the bliss.
I open my face. Let the teeth show. I
pull my shirt down past the collar-bones.
I’m still a boy under my breast spots.
I can drink anywhere. The rain. My
skin shattering. Up suddenly, needing
to gulp, turning with my tongue, my arms out
running, running in the hard, cold plenitude
of all those who reach earth by falling.

Marie Howe

When he finally put
his mouth on me—on

my shoulder—the world
shifted a little on the tilted

axis of itself. The minutes
since my brother died

stopped marching ahead like
dumb soldiers and

the stars rested.
His mouth on my shoulder and

then on my throat
and the world started up again

for me,
some machine deep inside it

recalibrating,
all the little wheels

slowly reeling and speeding up,
the massive dawn lifting on the other

side of the turning world.
And when his mouth

pressed against my
mouth, I

opened my mouth
and the world’s chord

played at once:
a large, ordinary music rising

from a hand neither one of us could see.

Tony Hoagland

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood

and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.

There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures unrecoverable

and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings

do not send their sinuous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others’ emotional lives

as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;

and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.

Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,

who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;
thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.

Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.

I have news for you—
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room

and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.

Megan Falley

In an effort not to crawl back to you, I crossed the 2 train off my subway map in blue ink,
called it a river, sold my canoe.

Swept the soot from the chimney into a vase, scattered it all over Manhattan. Husband, I
pretended it was your ash.

Spoke your name in past tense and still, when we found ourselves in the same bar,
phoned a mystic. Told her I was seeing ghosts.

When you confessed your mistress, her red hair, her scars, how you learned them from
up-close, from inside out, you were no longer the man I married but a dead deer in the
center of our swimming pool.

Our dog has always considered you a burglar. Knew to spit, bark, bite before I did. Once
while you were sleeping, I stitched her electric fence through your skin. I wear her shock
collar on nights I go out drinking, on days I can’t find a reason to stay away even though
you have left so many behind.

I’ve watched you with other women. The way you hand fruit to supermarket clerks, how
your eyebrows lift at anyone with fake nails. Your favorite party story is how you once,
publicly, pleasured a girl with your band mate’s drumstick. It’s no wonder we don’t
love the same music.

On our first date, I bought a dress off a woman in Brooklyn so I could stay with you one
more day. Last week I threw your clothes from our roof knowing they would have fallen
faster had there been a body in them.

When I found a picture of your ex-lovers tits, used as a bookmark, I began opening every
novel upside down like a teenager shaking birthday cards waiting for cash to fall out.
This explains my love for fiction. We were never married. The dog is not ours.

While washing the dishes I watch from the window as the children we never had drown
in the piss-filled pool. I’ve never tried to save them. I invented that pool, this sink.

Did you know that the metronome inside us quickens when telling a lie? I want to build
an honest house, where the motion detector is so sharp it knows when my thoughts leave
the room. Where the clap-on lamp works as a polygraph. When you swear you still love
me, the lights flicker.