A Story Can Change Your Life

On the morning she became a young widow,
my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow,
looked up from her work to see a hawk turn
her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers.
That same moment, halfway around the world
in a Minnesota mine, her husband died,
buried under a ton of rock-fall.
She told me this story sixty years ago.
I don't know if it's true but it ought to be.
She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt
on Sundays when the acolyte's silver bell
announced the moment of Christ's miracle,
it was the darker mysteries she lived by:
shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside,
a tapping at the door and nobody there.
The moral of the story was plain enough:
miracles become a burden and require a priest
to explain them. With signs, you only need
to keep your wits about you and place your trust
in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck
and grief are coming your way. And for that
—so the story goes—any day will do.

Peter Everwine

Ukraine

Father, I am scared.
Yet with You I can do all things,
believe all things,
hope all things,
endure all things.

Lord, grant me strength.

First Red, then Blue

I watched him hit the ball
and it was rough.
But he was fascinating
in the way that otters were,
lithe and destructive,
swimming around the rivers
in ways that only fish were allowed to.

He hit the red one first,
and then the blue.
The cue was loose in his hands,
yet it hit with precision.
Every single shot he made
I didn't make,
I was too distracted
by the bridge of his nose,
his shoulder rippling under the shirt
I got him for his birthday.

And I imagined us as strangers
sharing a game together,
walking around each other,
the road to hell paved with eggshells
and a bright blue bird
that sang to us out of a box.

But we weren't strangers
so I leaned over close to him
and gave him a kiss.
One game too many,
one game too few,
I guess walking around hitting balls
gave us something to do.

Rest.

It's so late I could cut my lights
and drive the next fifty miles
of empty interstate
by starlight,
flying along in a dream,
countryside alive with shapes and shadows,
but exit ramps lined
with eighteen wheelers
and truckers sleeping in their cabs
make me consider pulling into a rest stop
and closing my eyes. I've done it before,
parking next to a family sleeping in a Chevy,
mom and dad up front, three kids in the back,
the windows slightly misted by the sleepers' breath.
But instead of resting, I'd smoke a cigarette,
play the radio low, and keep watch over
the wayfarers in the car next to me,
a strange paternal concern
and compassion for their well being
rising up inside me.
This was before
I had children of my own,
and had felt the sharp edge of love
and anxiety whenever I tiptoed
into darkened rooms of sleep
to study the small, peaceful faces
of my beloved darlings. Now,
the fatherly feelings are so strong
the snoring truckers are lucky
I'm not standing on the running board,
tapping on the window,
asking, Is everything okay?
But it is. Everything's fine.
The trucks are all together, sleeping
on the gravel shoulders of exit ramps,
and the crowded rest stop I'm driving by
is a perfect oasis in the moonlight.
The way I see it, I've got a second wind
and on the radio an all-night country station.
Nothing for me to do on this road
but drive and give thanks:
I'll be home by dawn.

Richard Jones

I love you (and that frightens me)

I need to tell you,
I need to confess to you
that you frighten me.
Not in the way a ghost does,
no, not that way,
but in a way that's ever more surreal
and ever more mysterious.

I don't know how to lie to you
so I don't,
I know I'm as transparent as they come.
Do you miss the mystery of it all?
Of lobes and lips and tongues
of strangers?
Do you miss being new?

I suppose I don't want to hide from you,
I want you to see all,
know all,
feel all.
I want you to know that when I look at you,
sometimes,
I get this painful rush of love
up and down my heart
and every heart beat makes me want heaven on earth for you,
and that frightens me.

I am no sacrificial lamb,
I have no sacrificial goat,
all I can say is the truth to you, for you.
I love you
and that frightens me.

Saint of the Year

St. Rene Goupil

No Hemlock Rock (don't kill yourself)

Don't kill yourself. Don't kill yourself.
Don't. Eat a donut, be a blown nut.
That is, if you're going to kill yourself,
stand on a street corner rhyming
seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with
racket. Allow medical terms.
Rave and fail. Be an absurd living ghost,
if necessary, but don't kill yourself.

Let your friends know that something has
passed, or be glad they've guessed.
But don't kill yourself. If you stay, but are
bat crazy you will batter their hearts
in blooming scores of anguish; but kill
yourself, and hundreds of other people die.

Poison yourself, it poisons the well;
shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome.
I will give badges to everyone who's figured
this out about suicide, and hence
refused it. I am grateful. Stay. Thank
you for staying. Please stay. You
are my hero for staying. I know
about it, and am grateful you stay.

Eat a donut. Rhyme opus with lotus.
Rope is bogus, psychosis. Stay.
Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus.
Dare not to kill yourself. I won't either.

Jennifer Michael Hecht