During the war, I had a wagon and delivered groceries from door to door. I got a nickel for each order, though sometimes I’d have to make a couple of trips up five flights. Once in while, I’d get a penny tip. I’d help older ladies by putting the food away in their pantry cupboards or iceboxes. One day a woman with sad eyes asked me to help her clasp her necklace. She held up the back of her hair, which smelled like lilacs. She turned around and brushed herself against me. I had never been with a woman before. I ran away before I got my five cents. My friends said I was crazy, that I should have at least tried to kiss her. She was beautiful, but I knew something wasn’t right. Her sweetheart wasn’t coming back. In a few months, she announced she was pregnant and Sam from the pool hall had to marry her.
Usizo
The second time her boss raped her, she had a plan. She was going to try to come, to rub her clit up against him, ignore him like he was ignoring her. She had been hired to help with the children, do light cleaning. She’d just folded and stacked dozens of fluffy towels. His wife was working late again. The kids were asleep. Her attic room didn’t have a lock. Her orgasm loomed far away—a balloon, a kite yanked from her fist. Despite her plucky take on the situation, her body refused to yield. You could say he was a metal scoop and she was the hard ice cream straight from the freezer. You could say he was a jar opener and she was a cluster of vacuum-packed pickles. Or you could say it hurt like hell. He sighed, “Sweet girl.” She stabbed him with her nail file then said, “I quit.” He grunted and came first.
Bio: Denise Duhamel
Denise Duhamel’s most recent books are Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Two and Two, Mille et un Sentiments, and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems. A bilingual edition of her poems, Afortunada de mí (Lucky Me), came out in 2008 from Bartleby Editores (Madrid).
4 A.M.
This is the hour of food poisoning,
of car alarms
and firearms,
of someone creaking up the stairs.
4 a.m., the digital glares,
the hour when
wrong numbers ring,
sore throats begin,
drunk exes make their drunken calls,
a dog starts barking down the street.
The lumpy pillow, sweaty sheet,
and through the thin apartment walls
a neighbor loudly hacking phlegm
will always come at 4 a.m.
So many hours we’ve spent fretting
the praise that so and so is getting,
the good not given, love not taken
at 4 a.m. when we awaken,
the work not done, the bills not paid
(and yet not doing it or paying them).
The endless piss,
a night of drinking’s dehydration,
and diarrhea, constipation—
all rouse themselves at 4 a.m.
Would James Bond lie awake like this?
A godless hour,
the stomach sour,
again the digital red glare,
and we are suddenly aware
of birdsong filling up the skies
and blue beginning at last to creep
through curtains, blinds, and half-closed eyes
and with some luck fall back asleep.
Alley Possum
Fellow urbanite, how could your race
survive—convinced I can’t see you this close,
hunched next to our back porch, your grinning face
hidden behind a bag of Ranch Doritos.
In our next door neighbors’ headlights, your eyes shine
Heineken green, and you keep eating, heedless.
You forage in the cracks of our lives and dine
on our debris, jaws crammed with infected needles.
By day you play dead in a dumpster—poke
you with a stick, your whole being explodes.
Primordially stupid, tireless joke,
you waddle down the shoulders of our roads,
loot gardens, lie in our bed of impatiens,
finding the hidden gaps in our foundations.
Bio: Richard Newman
Richard Newman’s second full-length book of poems, Domestic Fugues, will be published by Steel Toe Books this fall. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry East, The Sun, and many other magazines and anthologies. He also edits River Styx. For more info, visit www.vacuumpacked.net.
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