ISSUES | spring 1996

An Oregon boot was a heavy iron cuff with an iron brace that ran down your ankle and under your arch. The idea of course was to discourage migration. It was invented by some crackpot warden at Salem with too much free time on his hands. We had Oregon boots in Wyoming in 1949, and walking in them was like walking across the exercise yard in ice skates. We did that too.

They are runaways, throwaways, “problem” teens; culls from meager schools and emissaries from questionable homes; bearers of “emotional disablilites” and lurid autobiographies for which they are medicated elaborately and counseled when possible; products of biology, family community, of fate, impure and hardly simple.

Aug. 2. An over-heated wind all day, and the dust that rides on it, not simple dust but dirt itself, the earth itself. The rags Ma stuffs in door and window sill hold back only some; and grit n her kitchen, on the oilcloth, pots, in the water-pail, a skin of it everywhere, near gives her fits. With grit in our teeth, we spit black.

“Learning to Breathe”
“38”
“Better Half”
“Visitor”

“In the Room with Seventeen Windows”
“Revenant”
“What I Hate About Postmodernism”
“Poem Written Late Century, Full Moon at Treeline, San Juan Range, Colorado”

The snow is delicate and knee high. It is cotton candy in my mouth, too fleeting to satisfy but enjoyable just the same. I bend in mid stride and shovel the powder with my gloved hand. With this motion I leave a smooth and straight gully that strikes me as the most perfect consequence of my effort, conspicuous in its complete lack of fault. I pack the snow against the roof of my mouth and suck it of its moisture. The remains trickle down my throat.

There were endless good reasons. For months now, Richard had lain in bed running over the list in his head, adding to it as though the reasons were dollars and he was wisely depositing them in a savings account.

“There is something satisfying and scary about making an angel, lowering your bulky body into the drowning fluff, stray flakes landing on your face. I am seven or eight and the sky looms above me, grey and dead. I move my arms and legs–expanding, contracting, sculpting the snow before it can swallow me up. I feel the cold filter into my head, seep through the wool of my mittens. I swish wider, faster, then roll out of my mould to inspect its form. Am I dead or alive down there? Is this a picture of heaven or hell?”

This poem is not currently available online.

“Easter Sunday”
“Vigil”

“At the Wall of Flame”
“The Window”
“At Seventeen”
“At Eight A.M.”
“Hospital Elevator”
“What Endures”
“Fall Into Winter”

“The novelist has a moral obligation not to leave the reader with unanswered questions.”

They had literally been planning this trip for years, Shana had longed to see Italy since she was a girl and they were supposed to have gone in 1952, for their honeymoon. But they’d had no money at all and the war devastation still lay across Europe like a smoking blanket and so it was put off, though with the absolute promise to one another that they’d go as soon as they possibly could, certainly before they had a child. However, Amy, unplanned and unexpected, was born less than a year later, and the trip was of course out of the question while she was still toddling about. Besides, Perry had just started his new job with Boeing, and how could they think about giving up the money when other young couples they knew were struggling so?

This poem is not currently available online.

Annie sees the man before he sees her. She’s on her way to Eric’s. A four-point-seven-mile walk. Her mom and dad, as she was leaving, stopped their Saturday-in-November yardwork and gave her the ritual I-spy. She had Marlboros in her pocket and a joint snuggled in her sock, but there were leaves to rake and chrysanthemums to pinch, and her mom and dad are never quite so KGB in daylight, and today, especially, you could tell they wanted to trust her — it’s the kind of red-cheeked, blue-sky autumn day that makes them want to believe in their daughter’s goodness. In the end, they let her go with just a “Be home in time for dinner,” and “Be careful on Lawton Pond Road.” Annie nobbed. Whatever. She’s fifteen and in love, and today’s the day she and Eric are going to do it.