Patricia Gray
Two Girls in an Upstairs Bedroom
Warm beneath the roof, quiet, a wisp
of curtain lifting at the window. Adults
gathering dinner from the garden. Fresh
tomatoes washed and glistening on the kitchen table.
My cousin is bored. She’s eight, and I am five.
“I have something to show you,” she whispers.
“Don’t tell anybody.
This is what they do at night.”
She folds back the spread.
We climb into bed. Her weight, heavy
as a barrel, rolls on top of me.
Crunched, I try to push her off. She covers
my mouth with her hand and begins
to bounce on me as if I were a cushion.
We don’t hear the footsteps on the stairs
until her teenage sister, Ally, sees us…
“Why didn’t you tell me
she was there?” my cousin hisses.
“We’re not supposed to do that!”
Not quite sure what happened,
I sit up, ashamed, remembering two dogs
romping, one jumping on the other.
My cheeks are scalded-hot.
I’m burning to know more.
Falling
Just a college boy home on break…we knew
each other in third grade,
but it’s as if, gazing at you, I’d never seen
a grown man before.
Was it like this when the first humans met—
maybe they showered
at the edge of a waterfall, nipples hardening
as they clung to each other
for warmth against the cold and weather?
Like that, I begin answering the song in you
with the song in me.
Like that, your hands declare themselves to me,
and my hands warm the cold in you.
Like that, I brush my lips to your skin, the way
a small child brushes her lips
to the satin edge of a blanket she loves…
Like that, my arms and legs and thighs rest
on yours. Your arms
and legs and thighs rest on mine. Our bodies
have met their keepers.
Like that, in pied sunlight, our skin is amber,
dappled, as if holding bits of ancient
animals and plants. We are newborn,
and nothing in us is new.
We are students. We are stardust.
Claude Clayton Smith
Flatbeds
Hauling Logs Near Bellingham
I have seen truck drivers
shift
a full Mack rig
without ever touching
the clutch,
slipping gears
on fingertip
clean through teeth
meant to mesh
like chainmail,
threading the needle
when the speed’s
just right,
poised
on the edge
of a stall—
no telling crunch
or lurching,
just a pure vertical puff
of black smoke.
The Seahorse Tree
Do you remember the seahorse tree?
Of course, you do.
It appeared at dusk when the sun
fell below No Business Mountain,
rearing its head against the growing
dark. You were growing, too, fatly
pregnant with the first of two sons,
boys who embraced the Blue Ridge,
accent and all, until we moved to Ohio
which killed their twang and flattened
our own speech, diluting its charm.
Today I found another seahorse tree,
sitting on our deck in Madison, beer
in hand, in the heat and humidity of
August after last night’s wind—like the
Blue Ridge ice storm that snapped limbs
to the tune of shotguns, leaving a seahorse
on the horizon of No Business Mountain.
Now there is another above an altered
Wisconsin vista. Sure sign of—what?
Four months later The New Yorker reports
that the hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped
structure in the temporal lobe, known for
years as “the seat of memory” until fMRI
technology revealed that it stores “summaries”
provided by the cortex—voxel patterns
“distilled along the dimensions that matter.”
Sure signs of—what?
Notes:
“Flatbeds” was previously published in Vilas Avenue
the poet's billow 