by Sharon Thesen

And liked to write about his household sealed up at night while icicles
descended to the window–ledges and the moon shone o’er snowy
fields and the baby slept in dreamless realms

And he, alienated and alone
with the detritus of his mind and dreary desperation
tamped down with the opium in his pipe

Having talked himself hoarse at the dinner table
not less than a week ago, about the tenor of the times
the politics the over–reaching of the arts the lack of

balance, of some sort of accommodation
to sanity and justice even if the person or character doing something

wasn’t quite aware of what it was, but we were,
we who watched. Things happen so quickly, so
under the radar that only a bat could pick it up

or human intuition, human knowing. We cannot
be fooled, Coleridge knew, without agreeing to.
That fact he called “the willing suspension of disbelief.”

In the smoky environs of his own opioid exhalations
Coleridge observed the icicles’ descent, the waning fire,
the page laid bare upon the table.

by Sharon Thesen

Art Bell would always say when someone phoned in about
coming home and finding aliens sitting on the couch,
“weren’t you absolutely terrified?” Well no, they’d say,
not really, it was surprising but
the aliens were quite polite, took our blood samples
and it was hard to tell
if it really happened but we KNOW it did . . .

Art Bell’s night–time voice
between canyons of semis
on the highway across the bridge
after a late class, Creative Writing or Composition,
dark in the winter, the heater on in the car

& the way the aliens inside the house looked and smelled —
what we’d call “concrete details” in Creative Writing —

the home–owners, an older couple, remembering
being lifted higher and higher
and the strange bright lights and gleaming machinery —

Thanks for the call, Art would say, from Nevada
at midnight, and next on would be someone
who knew the truth about contrails and the ghosts
of animals near nuclear waste dumps.

by Carolyn Smart

We were playing in the Rockeries after dark,
Cathy and David and I, we ran around the flower beds and
hid behind the rocks and trees, we ran and ran into the shadowed dark
until the night was fully with us, much too late for play.
Towards home they grew afraid of what would come
from all that running, the laughing and the fun,
and all the shadows grew around their brand new house
as we walked together up the hill towards the door.
Inside, their parents stood together and as one:
go to Cathy’s room and wait, they said to me,
while Cathy and her little brother David cried.
They were small, and so afraid.
I could not sit, I could not play or think,
I heard the father dragging Cathy down the hall,
in terror and in tears, and from the room next door
I listened while her father beat her with his belt,
the hollow thump in tempo with her cries.
I do not forget that sound: the breaking of a girl,
the shaming, the awful supremacy of adulthood,
and I was told to stay exactly where I was.
I did what I was told. But then I told.

by Carolyn Smart

There are four people in the car, two are grown–ups, they are your parents, and they
have been fighting for most of the drive. Now it is dark, dark because it is the end of
the day but also because words are weighing you down like a hood without eyes and the
car is surrounded by fog. It is England in the 1950s and the man gets out of the car
holding a torch which you wish was a giant cone of flames to burn the whole night
down but it is just a simple flashlight, weighty, useful for some things but now it
cannot even pierce the first five feet of pea soup.

Your mother sits behind the wheel. She is leaning forward as if she is at the dining
table and her elbows would be up on that table positioning her body for an argument |
and she’d have a cigarette in her right hand, one of 60 she would have smoked that
day before she laid her head down on the pillow, tasting nothing in her mouth at all
not even grief. At the table she would have finished off the wine your father poured
and it would slosh around her stomach with the whisky and the rich red meat she
cooked so well. But now she has the cigarette between the fingers gripping a steering
wheel and she peers out through the windshield at the man she married walking with
the torch into the pea soup.

The man, your father, sometimes tells a story when he is driving the car. The story is
about another man who pulls his car over to the side of the road and gets out and
walks away forever. Your father has said he too will do this. One day he does, but
not the way you imagine as a child. One day he walks out of the world itself, leaving
things tidy behind him though that is not entirely true. It’s like he’s ripped off the top
of something no one wants to look inside and no one ever can.

In the back seat you are sitting perched far forward as you like to see most everything
that happens in your life, close up, to lean as far into it as you possibly can and if the
world smacks you in the face as it goes by you are familiar enough with that because
your mother smacks you in the face in public and no one seems alarmed.

Next to you your sister sits too terrified to talk. It is a true pea souper out there.
Years later you two girls will hurtle down the M1 in a bus through a pea soup, nuns
praying by your side. Your parents will have no idea where you are. Your sister will
have stayed up all night worrying about you, worrying about herself carrying the weight
of your care.

That is all this story holds: the man waving the torch against weather, the woman
fogging up the car with smoke, the two girls who grew up anyway.