Having seen the smoke piling above the parking lot and the flames coiled around the cars      the firefighters instructing the crowd to move any vehicles not actively on fire

He pinches and pulls at the pictures on his phone, deciphering them like code. Every now and then he gets distracted and focuses on a background: a pair of boots, a fancy car. But mostly he studies the face, as if he’s preparing to write a dissertation comparing it to the Mona Lisa.

The distant hum of an approaching vehicle cuts through the quiet of Westmore, Vermont. It vibrates off the frozen midnight air, air that is charged and heavy with soon-to-fall snow, air that holds more promise than the mess of metal and wire in front of me.

Morning dawns gunwale gray and wet in Oyster City. The hurricane, first a roar in the night, then a howl, now a whisper of sea spray over the coast, barrels farther inland. Curtains of rain hang in the silence between gusts. The city stirs, ready to probe its wounds.

The mayonnaise has not been made.

As the onion contemplates how long it will be until someone notices that the mayonnaise has not been made, it sees Chef Doyle trying not to cry.

 This guy from the Netherlands grated on me and on all our doctoral peers whenever, with his heavily accented but perfect English, he held forth in our European Literature class.

So when I didn’t say the things I wanted to say, I had hoped you would know. Do you remember? You’ll shake your head. We’ve become all too predictable.

I know what a church pew feels like; to sit on, to touch, to be watched by. I know that even the most comfortable of pews can feel cold. Just because it’s been a while, just because the church has done renovations and now these seats are cushioned, doesn’t mean I don’t know; it doesn’t mean I don’t remember.

In my childhood home, difficult things were stored like smoke in a tight- lidded jar. Hurts, ills, and problems were a visible miasma through the glass, but they would sit in there, dense and palpable, not to be disturbed.

(DOG wags his tail, runs to the window and jumps on the windowsill.) 

DOG 

I think it’s him! He’s back! I knew he would come back. 

(We are in darkness. A beat. Then:)

FI: Did you notice the little red fox this morning?

Stage. A hospital bed is stage right. An unconscious teenaged girl lies in the bed. She has a breathing tube. Other tubes crisscross her chest and are attached to a monitor, and intravenous bags are affixed to a pole at the head of the bed.

We were shingling in the drizzle
of another century—I guess
we needed the money—and Mel
called out. He was sliding

When sunlight falls on the pear
it becomes the meal of a long dead woman
with heavy sleeves and small dog. Smoke
from her chimney billows across the roof,

I cook fresh artichoke—a head boiled bald,
butter melted in the day’s bragging heat.
The garlic bathes, my teeth glean flesh from each
earry lobe of bract, skin spit back to bin.

1. a nuthatch brings his wife to the potted bleeding hearts my mother gave me. it hangs on the front porch, vibrant red blooms beside the glass door.

Lith i um [‘liTHēəm] n.

1. Chemistry: soft metal that burns moon-white, lightest of the alkali, travels by river, swims in healing springs; reacts with our own carbon dioxide in Oxygen Masks, bends into plane, train, bike, and battery;

Morning of the twentieth, there is a universe on my wall. Just kidding it is only a burning square of light.

Visual Art by JC Alfier

Visual Art by Jim Ross