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The Screw Turns

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The Screw Turns All Saints Day. After a sermon  on Stephen, rain pelts like pebbles  on the shed’s tin roof. The difference  in Phillips and flathead, I say,  marking air with a cross,  is how one keeps you from slipping  off when the pressure mounts.  She hefts the small but real  Dewault she got for turning  five and finds the bit that fits.  Tongue out, her breath comes in spurts,  pink Champion shirt bent over the task even her lungs stop  to watch. Stephen, too, never asked for help as the screw turned,  never prayed the drill speed up  to get this over with. And if,  looking on, I pray the opposite,   forgive me, too. This chip off the block I hold—I know not w hat I do.
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Is He Really Here?

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Is He Really Here? In the dark before dawn my one head- light caught the Christ as he whipped out of a driveway on my way  to school, heeling his longboard  while he slurped a Polar Pop,  white robes and crimson sash  billowing like doubt behind him,  and I considered turning around to ask where he’d been and why this sudden breakthrough  into our interstate but then recalled how Penelope didn’t press  the beggar though she knew  he was up to something, resting instead that if it was   Odysseus then soon enough  it’d all be right, and if it wasn’t  the sleep-eye would clear with a bit  of coffee, a straight shot of morning light. 
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Playing Wonders

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You asked, so lying in the grass we imagined a giant screw, the size  of an elephant or even a house,  how they’d need an airplane  with heavy chains to get it off  the ground, how even then  it would crush whatever it touched when its point pressed wood, but then  since probably no one could   it would sit there, we guessed, rusting  in the solid certainty of its bigness, of no use at all.  A hawk circled above, tiny enough to fit in your fist. That’s why screws are small.
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Ultrasound

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Ultrasound It’s Tuesday, November. In front of us an amalgamation of gray. What had  to happen that we found ourselves  this way? Shapes shifting, sundering,  shaping themselves like cells, like selves, the static of what’s unable  to find its place. Then just when  despair’s little fist starts to tighten its grip,                of a sudden— there —a face. 
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Coming To

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Coming To Let’s pretend it really were like waking:  the dream rips at the seams and you slip out in a thin sheen  of sweat, bare feet pressed on reality’s floor. What's more, suppose all the bad things you did  you didn’t, the bad ones  they did undone. And remember that box which smelled of woodsmoke, held the sun, the one on waking you could never understand but stretched more than your hands for? weaves together— glass of water, ceiling fan, pants draped over desk— imagine  that , the flit of all those half-recalled faces  fixed. Let's pretend it was so.  For that, you’d be willing  to thrash a while yet  in these tangled sheets, no?   
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The Shot

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The Shot The night before I told her  how it all would be okay. That afterwards we'd feast at Droop Scoop, where spoons of every color rattled in their cups, cheering her name. I told her  how it was needed to cast the sickness far away, was for her good. I didn’t say it  wouldn’t hurt because we both knew  it would. That morning I left for school, then Gracie called at the bell to testify  how she sat there on the sheet, legs dangling and anything but fine, tears mixing with snot  like vinegar and wine. But she turned her face away and took the shot.
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Roadside

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Roadside How peculiar the curve of this  cabinet. My current house  could not accommodate  such a curve. Peculiar, too,  what makes us do what we do, like loading it in the back of the truck as if going home were no longer possible  without this curved cabinet. As if,  having once encountered such a singular curve, there’s no return  but to smash the walls and construct myself a place to receive such a soft assertion,  such grace. It was a Thursday,  and hear me when I say  my current state could not   accommodate such a curve,  but then when are we ready, ever, for the corner we turn?  
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