The Night Before Halloween
Someone left a brand-new plastic tiara, secured inside its flimsy box, perched on the cement barrier by a gas pump at the BP station on D Avenue. Someone scooped it from the oily pavement before a tire crushed it, placed it here, out of harm’s way, right-side up, the edge of the box square with the cement ledge, angled to showcase the fake silver filigree and glued-on gems not quite sparkling under the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling, diesel-scented dusk gathering beyond the lit-up pumps, and still, that tiara throws off enough light to catch a person’s eye. Someone loves us, after all.
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The Nearest House
If my car broke down on a country road and I walked to the nearest house—this one—with its gray paint and yellow door, with its wild but tidy garden, creamy hollyhocks swaying above small lavender clouds of catmint, with its hint of a path winding through the sprawling plants, an old couple so much like my grandparents might come to the door, wanting, as always, to quietly, graciously help, but not recognizing the forty-five years I’ve kept on driving sixty miles an hour, though now I’ve stopped to reach through memory for a detail more concrete than a nurse with dark hair and white cap, a businessman in a pin-striped suit. They pause a moment, then invite me in. Do they see the ghost of the blonde child who used to climb the oak in their yard? Who taught their little gold dog to beg for a biscuit? My grandmother serves tea and the soft sugar cookies with orange juice in the frosting. We sit in the living room that overlooks the backyard, chatting until the tow truck arrives, our voices familiar and strange, happy to watch the wind move through the lush green grass.
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Not How It Really Happened
At three a.m., no one knocks. (The poet means an actual knock.) The dog barks anyway. Afterwards, the poet hears only the rhythmic tick of the bedside lamp, cooling. Now the silence contains a dog, fur on its back standing up. (The real dog shakes and yawns, then jumps on the bed.) The silence contains the aspen, gentle and gray, its curving branches illuminated by the moon. (The tree’s so close and large, the poet worries someday it will fall into the house.) One spring night, an owl rested there, calling for a mate, calling long enough the family gathered to listen. Now the poet’s daughter says, You’re just making stuff up. It’s true she has forgotten this moment after bedtime when she was carried to the window. It’s true the poet has spent years turning keys into dimes, streetlights into stars. Years more considering the sky. Still, at 3 a.m., this memory creates a little circle of light. The poet steps into it, and invites her daughter.
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Kathleen McGookey has published five books and four chapbooks, most recently Cloud Reports (Celery City Chapbooks) and Paper Sky (Press 53). Her work has appeared in many journals including Copper Nickel, Epoch, Glassworks, Hunger Mountain, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, and The Southern Review. She lives in Middleville, Michigan.