By BOB HICOK
Caroline resembled moonlight.
She never appeared when it rained,
made the grass and broken windows
more beautiful, and had me wondering
if our love was waxing or waning.
Human systems exist in the mystery
always at the point of spilling
over green, over and over their present containers
of cities and grids and human perception
for what of entanglements, what of catastrophes
what of black holes, of soot from burnt timber
what of seashells, snails, urchins in the pavement
of ancient Greek settlements
“Happy and furry?” she inquires,
of the TV—
but I’ve tuned out. Uh-oh, this may be
tough to unriddle. When you’re eighty-three,
as she is, with creeping dementia—all
sorts of imponderables float by,
and everything the more inscrutable
if other faculties are failing too…
like hearing, perhaps. A few seconds later,
though, we enjoy a breakthrough,
as our breezy, blow-dried commentator
re-airs his catchphrase, which I move to clarify
by relaying it slowly:
“Happy. And. Free.”
… At day’s end, even so, I might prefer
happy and furry, as though she
might yet retrieve days when all of us were
that peculiar entity, a big family—
father, mother, four boys of various
ages and stages—become, like any true family,
inhabitants of a lair,
wound and bound in a low common smell
(our own must of sweat and hair),
that familial furriness which cordons off a small
walled area while informing a potentially
invasive world, This is us.
Happy and furry. The woman’s five years dead,
yet just last week the phrase returned
as I, watching a YouTube clip, was shepherded
to an obscure nature site by a tag that posed
a teasing test: TRY NOT TO CRY AS MAMA CHIMP
MOURNS BABY. The test? Frankly, I’m not sure I passed.
Embarrassed, as if being watched, I felt
my eyes prickle as the blinking simian—so loving,
so darkly puzzled—stroked and stroked the silky pelt
of a torso strangely limp
whose russet fire still burned,
though warming neither the dead nor the living.
… Furry, then, if not free. We mishear,
misread, we go on misspeaking,
and if our errors pain us, soon they disappear
into an unseen, unseeable, ever-amassing crowd.
Click here. Click. Now. Always, the furious din out there,
and what do our answers count, everything so loud
and larger always than yesterday? We learn to chart
our growth by the billion-, trillion-fold:
Vaster, faster numbers. See me. Click. Give me your heart,
click. Like me…. So many voices, all seeking,
as I suppose both mothers were, the warm, the old,
the furred primordial lair.
Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen books. His nineteenth, The Old Current, a collection of poetry, will be published by Knopf in February 2025. A former theater critic for Time, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Still bleeding from birth
I looked up from you, daughter
your grandma was
shouting at me
in our hospital room
and I thought, enough
of this childhood pain
(an emancipation never
complete in my heart)
the next weeks your little fist
dimpling my breast was a
mere aesthetic
as she had not blessed me
I could not let her go
For the cherries from
Saturday’s market I used
a sharp coffee spoon
each bright heart-organ
hoards the clit of the fruit
I stabbed and extracted
hurting my thumb
sometimes I couldn’t get
all the meat off
you fetched a stool
each fruit, gravely chosen
now came lifted and pillowed
on your soft palm
then you drank all the juice
in the discard bowl
it ran down your chin
and onto the floor
I drained all the juices
from under the flesh and
you guzzled that too
Such gusto my dear
with each breath I bless you
go go go
Farah Peterson‘s work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, The Best American Magazine Writing, The Florida Review, Ploughshares, and The Threepenny Review, and is forthcoming in the 2025 Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Born in gilded fealty to the state, which was the people’s will,
which was the refined sugar of suffering and indifference,
which was the inherited burden of society, gift of the forefathers.
Bathed in cream, I transmuted hayricks into silk and mirrors.
I ate and destroyed, seeking relief from my depression.
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