—after “My Husband and I Fight about Robots” by Sara Burge
Mother’s on her way back from the Fayette waterpark,
where the kids don’t know how to be lazy in the lazy river.
Mother’s trying to float in her tube,
and they’re knocking into me like we’re bumper cars.
In the background, Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.”
By LAKE ANGELA
Akron, Ohio and Opelika, Alabama
Grace: Sunday Services
As a girl in curls and white patent flats, I could criss-
cross worlds—Sicily and Ohio, steaming kitchen
and chilly study. I slipped through serving aperitifs and caffé
corretto, understood Sicilian but wasn’t meant to speak
Huntsville, Alabama
The news came on a Tuesday: U.S. Space Command was moving to Huntsville. The headlines said Redstone Arsenal wins the bid, but that word wins sat strange in my mouth. In the breakroom, someone printed the article and pinned it to the bulletin board above the coffee pot. The photo showed the gates of Redstone shining in the morning sun, a soldier standing guard beside the sign.
Outside my office window, trucks rumbled past loaded with pallets of equipment. The air always smelled faintly of dust and jet fuel. I thought about how this patch of land in northern Alabama, once a cotton field, then a proving ground, then a missile test site, was about to become home to something even bigger.
Grand Bay, Alabama
Finally, we sleep well, where the walls lean
with a drunk’s articulation. We wake
to homemade apple pies and hot cocoa.
We talk through a day of Rummy and three
By JASON TUCKER
Your mother and I were made in places that will never be your place. Northern she and Southern I are about to start raising an Upper Midwestern you. At least while these jobs hold out.
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