Author: Sandee Gertz

Midmorning abeam, abuzz, aubade about

walking our old block, applauding the view

that Yonkers is fair facsimile of my twenties. I can’t.

I can’t unthink pariah dogs queuing on rain’s garnet,

canines bared like tracer bullets at the street – nothing new

about collaborating with synecdoche of oneself.

The past. I could touch it                    almost, open

the day like a devotional book, work its clasp like

a dog’s flews and stare down its gullet, gasp

into living dark. Wycliffe called it

vtmer derknessis in St. Matthew’s account

of the healing at Capernaum (the desperate centurion

with his palsied son), translating Christ’s address as                                    Parable of the Weeds

ther schal be wepyng and gryntyng of teeth.                                       

My mind works through this forecast of tears

and how it was ten years before I first came to New York 

that I last took the bus from Echo Industrial Park,

believing it possible, then, to be reborn as morning

is, shedding night’s clothes at the close of shift.

Now I dog the blunting of an uncertain future

at midcareer. Health to the new bosses, sure.

As Christ sat at meat in Matthew’s house,

loud as a beaten dog, perhaps my namesake knew

the thousand ways to be shameless in a small town.

Perhaps knew that for small men, leaving leaves

nothing to choose between living & the life.

When the next-door neighbor

Molotov cocktailed our house

just after a midnight in June,

all four of us were asleep, we

who’d moved back home to the

Pacific Northwest after two

decades of lake effect snow,

thanks to those bodies of water

known as the greats. Their

delivery, similar to his, dropped

a cold so quick we’d often wake

like we did when the firemen

lumbered through our house

that hot night. Sometimes, the

Michigan snow kept closed

all that could open. Sometimes,

our next-door neighbor stood

out in the rain, his neck craning

at the possibility of drones above.

Snow can fool you, if you look

at it long enough. Everywhere

starts to look like it’s down.

If you don’t have an opening,

thoughts can take you there,

too. At the trial, our next-door

neighbor confessed to thinking

we were the bad neighbors from

years ago. I opened a door in the

place where I live. I asked him to

come inside.