Though I urge you to check out River Styx's Hungry Young Poets series this summer, I also want to alert you to a poet who will be on the bill for the first regular-season reading on September 21. B.H. Fairchild is the author of the marvelously titled poetry collection Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (Norton, 2002). This poem, below, is from that collection; you can hit Norton's site to read more of his work. & note: St. Louis' own Jenny Mueller will be reading that night as well. --Stefene Russell
Mrs. Hill
I am so young that I am still in love with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings, submarines powered by baking soda, whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually, not even them. Nobody can hear them.
Mrs. Hill from next door is hammering
on our front door shouting, and my father
in his black and gold gangster robe lets her in
trembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow
pleading, oh I'm so sorry, so sorry,
so sorry, and clutching the neck of her gown
as if she wants to choke herself. He said
he was going to shoot me. He has a shotgun
and he said he was going to shoot me.
I have never heard of such a thing. A man wanting to shoot his wife. His wife. I am standing in the center of a room barefoot on the cold linoleum, and a woman is crying and being held and soothed by my mother. Outside, through the open door my father is holding a shotgun, and his shadow envelops Mr. Hill, who bows his head and sobs into his hands. A line of shadow seems to be moving across our white fence: hunched-over soldiers on a death march, or kindly old ladies in flower hats lugging grocery bags.
At Roman's Salvage tire tubes
are hanging from trees, where we threw them.
In the corner window of Beacon Hardware there's a sign:
WHO HAS 3 OR 4 ROOMS FOR ME. SPEAK NOW.
For some reason Mrs. Hill is wearing mittens.
Closed in a fist, they look like giant raisins.
in the Encyclopedia Britannica Junior
the great Pharoahs are lying in their tombs,
the library of Alexandria is burning.
Somewhere in Cleveland or Kansas City
the Purple Heart my father refused in WWII
is sitting in a Muriel cigar box,
and every V-Day someone named Schwartz
or Jackson gets drunk and takes it out.
In the kitchen now Mrs. Hill is playing gin rummy with my mother and laughing in those long shrieks that women have that make you think they are dying. I walk into the front yard where moonlight drips from the fenders of our Pontiac Chieftan. I take out my dog whistle. Nothing moves. No one can hear it. Dogs are asleep all over town.
