#exceptindreams

There was the one who walked into a river with her pockets full of stones and the one who started her car with the garage door closed, determined to drive herself elsewhere. The youngest went into the kitchen and placed her head where she had so often placed chickens or hams. These were the women whose voices I carried in my backpacks, whose books moved with me from one city to another and, one day, I realized I had outlived all of them. I was sad that they could not describe the other world, that they offered no map to old age. Was it dangerous to write? I began to walk more carefully beside rivers, to eat cold food, to let someone else back the car out of the driveway.

Somewhere between what it feels like, to be at one with the sea, and to understand the sea as mere context for the boat whose engine refuses finally to turn over: yeah, I know the place— stumbled into it myself, once; twice, almost.  All around and in between the two trees that grow there, tree of compassion and—much taller— tree of pity, its bark more bronze, the snow             settled as if an openness of any kind meant, as well, a woundedness that, by filling it, the snow might heal…You know what I think? I think if we’re lost, you should know exactly where, by now; I’ve watched you stare long and hard enough at the map already…I’m beginning to think I may never not be undecided, about all sorts of things: whether snow really does resemble the broken laughter             of the long-abandoned when what left comes back big-time; whether gratitude’s just a haunted space like any other.  This place sounds daily more like a theater of war, each time I listen to it— loss, surprise, victory, being only three of the countless fates, if you want to call them that, that we don’t so much live with, it seems, as live for now among.  If as close as we’re ever likely to get, you and I, is this—this close—

Carl Phillips

This morning, the lovers— who last night were slurring and stumbling and when I looked out, each gripping the other’s taut throat in a clench of callous and nail—sit on their front steps. The woman smokes an idle cigarette. The man lounges two steps down from her and leans his head into her lap. Beer cans and husks of blue crab from their cookout scuttle by in languid breeze. The woman flicks the stub of her cigarette into the street and kisses her man on his forehead. In the kitchen behind me, Naomi turns on the coffee grinder. I look back at her but don’t bother to complain about the racket this time. I’m more interested in the lovers. Or, I was—they’re boring me now. I liked them better when the radio was pumping from their open window, and they were clawing out, under the streetlight, the terms of their love.

Iain Haley Pollock

The sky hangs up its starry pictures: a swan, a crab, a horse. And even though you’re three hundred miles away, I know you see them, too. Right now, my side of the bed is empty, a clear blue lake of flannel. The distance yawns and stretches. It’s hard to remember we swim in an ocean of great love, so easy to fall into bickering like little birds at the feeder fighting over proso and millet, unaware of how large the bag of grain is, a river of golden seeds, that the harvest was plentiful, the corn is in the barn, and whenever we’re hungry, a dipperful of just what we need will be spilled

Barbara Crooker

In the photograph I do not have of us we are lying on a mattress in an otherwise

vacant apartment. It’s clear from the angle that one of us has taken it, the way lovers do

in moments of happiness, to preserve something of it or to show off to their friends

or just to know what they look like, lying there, before anything’s exploded.