Todd Boss

when you drop your mate at the dock or your children at school. Don’t be cool. Don’t be coy. Or if you do, don’t assume it’s okay to act that way. For today may be your last chance at joy before it flashes away like a tin toy in one of those shooting galleries in midways: those ducks that seem to paddle a stream that’s not a stream but a rotating axle, toothed for disappearance & reappearance, a spit without point or flame, along which randomly clucks the whole game.

—retracing

A rung’s come broken in the ladder to the mow and so one hesitates to clamber up there just to bomb a cow with dung or bother swallows from their rafter cakes. It takes a new footing some- where in the ribs’ treads, about heart- height, to climb it now. A new gap’s in the smile that smiles from the limed barn floor. There seems to come a break in the war. But soon, one of a neighbor’s sons, too young to know it was otherwise once, braves it, and soon, even with a sweater- swaddled kitten or a BB gun, all the kids can do it again, nearly at a run, like pros, and so it goes, as before.

i. a wife will wean

Its fine incisors grinding my mother fed my father’s fledgling carpentry concern into her adding machine as if its hunger could be satisfied costs and savings spooling to our wooden kitchen floor and pooling amounting to nothing a shop tool’s shavings.