Updike and I Share nothing besides sympathyfor rabbits, his Americana not my own. I am the other kind ofcustard. Still, he lays a tender track of Ford, how we assembleit ourselves, and I think in other lives, we root for the sour stemtogether. Weaken our bonds to godly values, spread malaise likea layer of fat. I connect to his car and relationship to Christmas, theway his water trembles upward occasionally, like happiness. Atthe end of a rabbit, the century turns, and a boy suddenly learnshe has a sister. Acrylic kin, he promises to walk her down theaisle. The only thing they have in common has long gone, whichdoesn’t really matter.…

Blueberries I’m seduced not by their plumpness, northeir sometimes-sour midnight skin,but rather by how your tall frame bendseach morning at the low freezer drawer,hoists the big bag, pours a clanking handfulinto your bowl, then (beep-beep-beep,vrrrrrrrr) heats them in the microwaveto grace your Scottish oatmeal. It’s not their sweetness, no, it’s the routine—how it creeps into our lives blindlywith its cool quietude, its fresh comb of honey—that makes me want to grasp too tight.I am, after all, my father’s daughter;his gritted teeth, his flex-jawed smile,they’re also mine. But I want us held fastby something more than my fixed gripand stronger than my small fingers;something intangible, reliable, tender. I’d like to draw…

Downsizing My new neighbor is out there again, this time plunking weeds from his flower beds into a plasticbucket. Yesterday he used his shrieking leaf blower to wreak havoc on his six-foot-squareAstroTurf lawn, sending yellowed magnolia tree remnants flying into the street. When he and hiswife moved into our retirement community of manufactured homes a month ago, I said hello onthe sidewalk. We chatted about where we used to live. He said: We downsized from a five-bedroom house on a half-acre in the foothills. What we used to do. I said: I was regional directorof human resources for a hotel company. Now as I see him through my window working…

Dispatch from the second morning of my sixth migraine hospitalization When the nurse wakes me up at 5:30am to ply me with electrodesI literally scream my way out of a dream. Apparently Thorazinecan pull your QT like taffy, and if it gets too long you’re out of luck. I pass my EKG and am awarded a gelatin capsule with a hundredtiny pearls in its casing, a pharmaceutical crown. They give youthe Benadryl first so you don’t fly out of the cuckoo’s nest when they startthe drip. In other fun facts, it turns out squeezing Thorazine through your veins makes your noseso stuffed that even as the drip pulls you under,…

Cleaving, We Respond to a Fascist To crack open a window shreds the spider’s workas to smash an egg along the sharp glass rim kills possibility,defunct already. Soon enough all will be broken. A zipper shreds cloth I can’t hold together, teethplacid, irrevocable. One guest leaves behind a hair fastenerand so, like cirrus, her white mane flows freely down her back. She won’t return here to claim it.We are all near death but speak only about the stateof our days in a world coming apart. If we say “seamless” or “inevitable” or one such word cowardswill use to mask their horror at helplessness we jointhe pack, don’t we, foregoing agency…

Black Feathers It’s time to stoop and gather up black feathersfrom corners of the run we built, its sidesa type of chain mail meant to bar the mostdetermined predator. One found the onlyhole we missed, squeezed small and burrowed into stun our pullets one by one—the chickswe named and trained to trust our clumsy handsas if our care could keep them safe. This morninga stillness tipped me off to what I’d find.Though we spent hours fashioning this fortress,death outspent us, fueled by one sure thing:it would outlast us, worming its way in. April Lindner is the author of two poetry collections—Skin (winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Prize from…

At Home …terribly nervous when I sang…. You just have to love performing, and I happen to be an introvert.—Annette Hanshaw, early-twentieth-century jazz singer Some animals belongto land. Some to water. Some to the inbetween: an alley cat swimming, a fish flunginto orbit. Reader, where do you belong? My late greataunt stood under the stage lights and despised it—secondby second, year by year. Is shein the wind? Is she super annuated, beautifulor gone? I find my dog asleep on the couch. I easein beside her, close my eyes. Margaret Hanshaw is a poet and writer from Sudbury, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, New American Writing, West…

Two months into the trial separation a man offers me coke in a hotel bar30 years or more since my last time, racingthrough campus as a light snow fellon the black balloons I gripped, propsleft over from my friend Carl’s productionof Suddenly Last Summer, the coke racingmy already high strung body, high strungmy mother’s words for the anxiety she andmy father grew in me with their fracturedunion—my father’s fist to the dining tablemy mother’s excuse for my father’s fist—so that in the conference hotel bar the manhas to talk me through it, the bathroom stallthe key, how I only need a little and he’s rightI party with him all night…

High Crossing This part is true.Somewhere right now,a man stands in a car lot, confused.His hands hang unused at his sidesand the sun declines across the highway.He does not understandwhy he is here.The car lot is already closed.Fields of pavementare swallowing the approach of night.The man looks down the frontage roadthen up at the quilted blanket of sky.From here he can see the highway.He can picture himselffloating away on its stream of lightsas sirens echo on the wind.Across the road, the hotel signglows with memoriesbut does not reassure him.He has no knife,no matches, no kindling.Without a fire, he could perishin the talons of creaturesthat come hunting in the night.He climbs…

Vase Behold the vase upon its plinth. A tight carapaceof sang de boeuf reflectsthe light, warding offthe gaze. The narrow neck closely guardsthe ample base, admittingnothing. Only where the lip flares outto reveal the naked ivory throatdoes it allow that once, perhaps, there was a pouring in or out. Suzanne Osborne—after an early career in theater, a stint in academia, and too many years as a legal secretary—now lives in Forest Hills, NY, and writes poetry. Her work has appeared in New Plains Review, Oddville Press, and Indolent Books’ The Second Coming series, among others, and is forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review.