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THE RETURNED
They’ve come through the rain
with red leaves stuck to their shoes,
hungry, popping cabinets open
and shaking the cereal boxes.
They eat the last of everything.
They don’t wonder
if the fish at the bottom of its blue
graveled bowl is asleep
or dead,
nothing is dead.
Like the insides of teacups
they gleam. Never drowned
or hunted, they have no wounds
on their bodies. They are
where they left off—
So how can we explain our constant longing
to touch, to follow
and kneel at the doors
closed to us? Wanting to know
what can’t be told:
Faces pressed to keyholes,
each room a diorama,
the dressers, combs and the
little shells.
—Erin Malone
Copyright © 2019 by Oberlin College.
May not be reproduced without permission.
SWIMMING DURING POLIO
When the normal man in midlife
sighs, assents to sell his fleamarket doll
whose eyes he loved to make blink,
when our Taiwanese new citizen
laughs telling me he delivers mail
to a clothesline of American bras,
when the blind art professor
adopts a cat that must be silky
and specifically ebony,
when the junior high bully shows
his teacher why he acts out mean:
under his lifted shirt, three nipples…
when I’m hit in the spine by a lime
on my way to baste the steelhead,
and in the breast by a bag of the harder
candy bars, nougat and nuts,
we bought to sweeten the frightening kids,
when my longest-living friend’s
entire news she couldn’t speak
consisted of “this,” when I surmised that meant
the soul escaping from her hopeless daughter
during the fruitless pumping
on the swimmer’s back, the way you empty,
one push at a time, an air mattress to pack away,
the lifeguard plum-slick and smelling burnt,
then I dove through chlorine, a thin blade
filleting a trout, got out, slathered
coconut on small thighs, looked up
at the high springboard’s terminus,
from which, once winter’s harbor
is drained, you might see all that is left
of one soggy squirrel…
When Dr. Sanfilippo immunized my right rear rose,
I bent the needle. That’s when Aunt Ruth
with her oil paints, and the neighbor boy,
the chemist’s son, sat frozen with polio
on the hot cement by the pool.
—Sandra McPherson
Copyright © 2019 by Oberlin College.
May not be reproduced without permission.
TOURIST
The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations.
—Simone Weil
She wants to eat god, so she goes
to the museum. She wants to gum
the wrist of the baby in the paintings,
especially when he is depicted as simply
a mini adult. She goes by the book,
the one in her backpack, and though she says
Greek to herself quietly, over and over,
Greek, Greek, here in this northern city
on a river nowhere near the Mediterranean,
she wants to sink her teeth into the folds
of white marble robe wrapped around
the headless female figure. She wants for
resistance, wants to stuff the hard consonants
of this foreign language into her mouth.
She goes to the cheese shop and looks,
goes to the butcher shop and looks at
the meats as they glisten and hang, wants
for transitive verb and object without
interposing preposition, so she goes
to the cathedral to eat the organ, goes
to the river to consume the architectural leftovers
of ancient commerce, wants to eat the word
architecture, she wants to taste the briny smell
of the hulls and the damp bodies of the people
in the bus wants to dry her tongue
on the felt of the seats wants to click her teeth
against the shiny red pole she hangs
onto, standing, while the bus jerks
all the bodies around corners. She
wants to bite down on the thick coins
in her pocket, carry them pinned
between molars, taste all the hands,
the hotel room key-card would fit
in her closed mouth, propping out her cheeks
like the x-ray bite-plate panel at the dentist.
When she meets her dark-haired host she
takes his hand, raises it to her lips.
—Margaret Ray
Copyright © 2019 by Oberlin College.
May not be reproduced without permission.
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