by Kevin Sweeney

My pal David had the shits last night and doesn’t drive
so I took him to the dentist, past the Congregational
church on Woodford Street where my pal Jack married
a Protestant 12 years ago, a union recently ended,
so Jack is at the island cottage soon to belong to his ex
and she’s at the suburban house (on the market) where
they’d lived as white people who watched what they ate
and spent wisely. Now Jack is spent from his new
girlfriend, 17 years younger, recently divorced herself.

The Congregational church has scaffolding around white
pillars that greet entrants of whom I was one the day Jack
married Deb. I read St. Paul on love, the usual wedding fare, though this was the second for each. Problem was I’d missed
the rehearsal; Jack forgot to tell me about it then phoned from
the dinner, said, “Oh shit, fuck, shit” and made me promise not
to tell Deb. He told everyone I’d gone to the wrong church
at the wrong time as though I’d been 8 –10 Guinnesses into oblivion. Even Jack’s Irish once–Catholic family acted like
I was Brendan Behan. Deb, a business teacher at Forprofit U. with aspirations to pretense, had that cluck–cluck expression
of women who think men must be cowed to prevent
their ribald, slovenly, and impecunious ways.

The minister took for her homily the text of “The
Velveteen Rabbit,” what I expect from Protestants.
They’re always so happy happy joy joy a la Ren and Stimpy.
We Catholics, I tell David, know better. Five years after
Jack’s nuptials, his brother packed the truck, left his wife
and house and went West. Now Jack’s on the island with
a woman who might make him happy, and they’re fucking
like velveteens while the Protestants fill recycling bins
and say no to domestic violence in nuclear–free zones.

I give David some anti–shits pills I brought from home.
He’s a poet on a fixed income, also a converted Jew
who laughs when I say Catholics would never use
children’s books for wedding fodder — maybe something
like Luke’s gospel about “imminent tribulations.”
It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t fix the front of our church
too, but we understand it’s all coming down, turning to dust. Count yourself lucky if a dark–haired woman rides
the ferry across the bay and makes you cry out
oh baby, oh baby, one more time on a summer day.

by Kevin Sweeney

She sat on the right, was willing to answer
questions which, nights in July, met silence
from others, gave me an enthusiastic Hi
in the student lounge in October, but
January an asst dean of dreary
emailed the obit from the Press Herald.

She died of some misnomer natural cause
at 27, had worked for years at a jeweler’s,
loved Westbrook, her home town that hasn’t
smelled since they cleaned up the paper mill.

When relating literature and real life, she’d
often said, “My fiancé and I” and a quick
pulse of doubt entered the room: Do you
have a ring? Has he said he’s willing to go
that far with a plain heavy girl in glasses,
a voice nature calibrated a decibel too loud?

Her name was Joanna. I liked her earnest ways,

hand in the air with insight. She wasn’t the girl
kidnapped, strangled and dumped off Rte. 25
or the young man last seen at Bill’s Pizza after
the bars closed, found floating under Veterans’
Bridge two months later. No one taped her
photo to every door in every building asking

HAVE YOU SEEN HER?

The email said nothing about a flag
at half–mast, made it clear she wouldn’t be
graduating in May, returning for summer
school again when I’ll be teaching that
same course in the same room.

by Kevin Sweeney

I felt she was cheating on me that afternoon
in front of Melman’s Market. I was a limp 14.
The boy holding her hand looked 17. She
laughed when he pulled her close, breasts
rising and falling inside a navy blue cotton shell.

My grandmother told my father: Look at that girl;
she’s a knockout — while I, her one –time classmate
at Resurrection School, sat in the back seat of
the station wagon with a ¼–inch dick. She was

Susan Waters in Pittsburgh where everyone’s name
was Pierogi or Halupki, but she had the movie star
moniker plus blond hair and blue eyes authentic
as non–chain burgers and hand–cut fries.

I hadn’t seen her since we’d left for same–sex high
school. I’d never heard “knockout” used that way.
I thought of Emile Griffith KOing Benny “Kid” Paret
not long after my mother died; Paret died too.

I was afraid I’d never get any better at football,
that math had my number and girls would
prefer 17–year–old scientists who understood
the mysteries of the human frame.

I knew my mother could have explained why
Susan Waters wasn’t cheating and why
she looked not only beautiful but happy.

by Judith Zander
          translated from German by Bradley Schmidt

at least the animals loved
our hedging talk grated
geckoes good for coughs and
commode–size ammonites
were the first to slip underneath
fish with mixed containing colored bones
morays maneuvered in our
sentences and squealed on the cute
island squirrels that reveal themselves to be
rats it is best if we do not mention
the gomerian maybugs while eating
a bestial laughter escaped
from us between the bites
we lured helpless hummingbirds
with sticky lips and chased even more fantastic
monsters our words shot the largest lion
what a lark puking
instead of putzing around
the hunter’s child reveals
i’ll cook myself a fox