Chris Forhan

Jam jar of cigarette ends and ashes on his workbench, hammer he nailed our address to a stump with, balsa wood steamship, half-finished— is that him, waving from the stern? Well, good luck to him. Slur of sunlight filling the backyard, August’s high wattage, white blossoming, it’s a curve, it comes back.   My mother in a patio chair, leaning forward, squinting, threading her needle again, her eye lifts to the roof, to my brother, who stands and jerks his arm upward—he might be insulting the sky, but he’s only letting go a bit of green, a molded plastic soldier tied to a parachute, thin as a bread bag, it rises, it arcs against the blue—good luck to it—my sister and I below, heads tilted back as we stand in the grass, good luck to all of us, still here, still in love with it.

For S. S. She reads by the light of a guttering candle and likes the feel of each page's gilt edge as she lifts it slightly at the corner, readying herself to turn it. If the wind whips the sycamore branches outside her window, if her nightgowned shoulders shudder once from a sudden chill, so much the better, and the book must tell of children toiling for bread and pennies in a textile mill, or tender brothers doomed to sharpen their bayonets in opposing armies, or a family of refugees, dust in their mouths, gazing with longing at the far shore of a river. And I long only to be the author of that book she reads whose page glows from the same dim flame that illuminates her face, the author whose thought she contemplates as she touches a fingertip to a word to mark her place and turns her head toward the kettle that has begun to whistle.