Each pub has a barrel-rolling team. That makes ten teams. You wear fireproof gloves. The barrel is full of flaming tar. You have to see how long you can keep the barrel up in the air. It works like a relay. Four people on the team. You pass it to the next bloke when you get too hot and the barrel gets too heavy. You hold it high up above you and in your hands you rotate it; the flames shoot out into the crowd as you run down the streets. The people compact into themselves. You shout and the people duck down and run back and climb over each other and the flames shoot out at them and you laugh at the manic growls of fear and panic. There haven’t been more than a few deaths.

Warren brought Toast to the party with him. Toast is a chicken. One evening two years ago Warren phoned his cousin and said Hey, man, I’m horny, bring some chicks over. His cousin lives on a farm. He gathered up twelve chicks from the barn and threw them in the back of his pickup truck and drove them to Warren’s apartment.

Warren said, Dude, that’s so totally not what I meant.

The dog ate eleven of them. The survivor ran around the house and slid around on the kitchen floor and squeaked when it was hungry. That chicken’s gonna be toast pretty damn soon, someone said. That’s why they call him Toast.

at the suspension center the counselor said keep a journal.

i said piss on that.

she said watch your mouth & i said watch your own or ill smack you upside of it.

i mean I always wanted to have a journal but i couldnt tell her that. i said fuck off i aint keepin a journal, she said its a requirement, i said pissonit.

so im doing it anyways i just aint lettin on to that old diesel-dyke bitch about it.

why its lowercase is coz that’s what trent says you do if you write stuff down, if your good you do it lowercase. like he says if you write poems thats what they all do all the poets do he said.

Then, without any warning, Taylor could speak Abini. June and Peter could not recall a learning period, a month when the girl communicated awkwardly with the villagers. By the time June noticed her daughter speaking the native language, the girl was spitting out long sentences at her friends, laughing with them, and joining in songs and chants, and when June’s back was turned to Taylor and her friends, she could barely distinguish her daughter’s voice from those of the other children.

When he woke up, he did not know where he was, and the red, grease-covered boys and the men chanting in Abini began to blend into a dark pattern where he could no longer make out individuals. The men started to play bamboo flutes, and the sound disappointed Peter. The flutes sounded distant and reedy, and the music had no melody, only an insistent percussive drive. He looked around the room and tried to find Makino or any of the other men he had come from Abini with, but he could not distinguish any of the people around him.

It was only when he saw [his daughter] Taylor, sitting near the door with poinsettia leaves crowning her head, that he realized he was hallucinating. Ah, he thought, I am really very sick now. And then he was aware of fainting into Makino’s arms.

She called Taylor inside and asked her to pronounce the words. Taylor stared at her mother, silent, with large eyes that seemed full of fear. For a moment June thought that she would say something, or refuse to be with her, but she stayed there, quiet, unhappy, and finally began to speak Abini so quickly the words sounded like hiccups in her mouth. June mimicked her daughter and heard how awkwardly her own voice wrapped around the language—she knew she sounded wrong and comical.

“I can’t get it right,” she said.

“Try, Mom. Try harder,” Taylor said.

“You see, Schmuel,” Aaron resumed, in the tone a very wise man might employ with a very simple child, “the fact is, women’s voices are arousing to men. Don’t you find this to be so?”

“Sure, the good ones. Is that wrong?”

“And when you’re aroused,” he went on, “what happens to your concentration? Out the window. This also is why we separate the genders in shul. Also why our women cover their hair, knees, and shoulders. Why they wear thick stockings, not thin ones. When we pray, we want to immerse ourselves in prayer, not distract ourselves with sex.”

I spoke up then for distracted people everywhere. “What’s so bad about sex?”

“I can’t write it down,” she declared.

“Here, I have a pen.”

“No, no. You don’t understand.” Her hands were bunched into fists. “It’s Shabbos.”

Suddenly this tiny obstacle—my not having a card, and her not being able to write my address down—loomed very large and formidable: a deal-breaker. This Shabbos business, I thought, was getting out of hand. All it did was throw up barricades to normal human behavior. What was so restful about that?

On the cloth sat a bottle of purple Manischewitz wine and a naked baby. The baby, his nap interrupted, looked a bit stupefied. Was this a dream? According to the Talmud (Hal continued), each of us is taught the entire Torah in utero, but in our journey down the birth canal an angel taps us on the lips—an impression we retain forever—and makes us forget it all. Thus we begin life already betrayed by education, with only a blank slate upon which to record our blunders in the world.

Not that this was the baby’s only predicament. Here, leaning over him, was an old man with a knife. And here at his feet was another old man, his alleged grandfather, prying apart his ankles. What kind of vengeful conspiracy was this?

I am a fantastic lover. I’ve got to give me that. There are only two things about me that females don’t like: the fact that I sing when I drive—admittedly, I’m not a musician—and my skiing. All the girls I know ski moguls well—really solid bump skiers—and I try to turn in the swells and lose my downhill line. I have thick hair. I’ve got a car that stinks from new leather. My skin, my body—that’s all decent. But I get ridiculed on bumps, and the way I sing gets mistaken for a joke or an imitation of someone dippy, when in fact your car is one of the few places besides the bathroom where you can sing the best songs the way they were meant to be sung. They all think my singing is terrible. Screw them. (I did.)

They say a pregnant woman looks radiant. Lynn went around for two weeks, agitated and angry and with an upset stomach, but she really did look radiant—it was like a cosmetics expert had done something to her face. Her cheeks were flushed all day, and her eyes were as bright as green candy. I can’t explain the difference. I kept catching myself staring. For those two weeks she was nauseous and pissed off. Added to that, I was still in training for my job, we were not married or engaged or anything, and Lynn really didn’t know, ha-ha, was she ready to be a mother? Maybe she wasn’t and maybe she was. Is twenty-two too young? She toyed with the idea while lolling around in the bath, conditioning her hair. Well, I knew. I’m sure. Please ask me.

I licked her ribs. She took her dress off. She had a face that held all the mysteries of Ireland. She had a single blond hair coming out of her chin I never saw before. She wore old blue cotton panties with just a slight fume of musk and salt. She let me pull them all the way down.

As Kelly grew more confident, using longer, smoother strokes on her second leg, I became frightened that she’d hurt herself. The more adept she became at shaving, the more I held my breath against the inevitable nick, the free flow of blood from her body. Watching her, I thought about Sean’s wrists, how he had tried to slit them, how he had shown the scratches to my mother, offering them up as evidence of what he had done, as if she would not otherwise believe that he had swallowed handfuls of my father’s heart medicine. And he was right. She could not believe it. It was unbelievable. She made him show her the bottle, near empty now. Was it out of consideration that he had left a few pills for my father?

Shortly after he died, my mother took out all of the cardboard backing in a picture frame and filled the space with an entire set of his school pictures, from kindergarten through ninth grade. Every so often, she changed the order of the photographs so that a new picture of Sean was displayed. One month we might see him as a second-grader, wearing his First Communion suit. The next time we looked, he was fifteen, with his hair parted in the middle and his face showing its first signs of manhood…

When she was two and just talking, Sarah would point at each new picture and ask, “Who’s that boy?” “Who’s that boy?” “Who’s that boy?” until she had grown used to the sight of her uncle from the ages of five to fifteen.

When I was a child, I’d sit on the edge of my parents’ bed and watch my father undress every day after work. He conducted his closet as if it were a second business, arranging his wingtip shoes, from brown to black, across the floor. They shone there under the darkness of his trousers, which hung by the cuff. I would watch him, standing in his shirttails, his garters and socks, while he put away one day’s pants, picked out another pair to wear the next morning, and hung them on the back of his closet door. His legs were as white as the moon when it’s full, smooth as the silk ties he wore, rich with blue lines of blood. I never understood, and still don’t, why Michael, who sprawled beside me on the bed sometimes, preferred to read from the evening paper, splaying our silence with facts, when each day he could have followed my father changing his clothes.

Spring of 1954, my mother stood at the threshold of Henry Picotte’s abandoned chicken house, a bouquet of hens dangling in either hand, and eyed the enormous prairie rattler coiled on the dirt floor. Killing the snake would be inconvenient, hampered as she was by a midterm pregnancy and the hysterical chickens swooping left and right around their new hoe, but a weapon would not have been hard to find. Stout diamond willow sticks leaned against every gatepost on the place, anywhere a man might step off a horse. Such readiness suggested an extended family of snakes, more than she wished to dwell on with her hands full of squawking chickens. Stepping back out, she hollered for my father to bring a spade.

It’s true what they say about the rural school experience—the ranch kids who attended one-room country schools saw both the best of education and the worst it could offer. At best, we received one-on-one attention, with every assignment marked and returned to us to be corrected; spelling bees, learning games and elaborate Christmas programs; and of course we had the advantage of all grades in one room—this last lending the effect of having lessons presented subliminally for a year or two before being called upon to master them yourself. At worst, we had chaos. A school taught by only one teacher is bound to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of that teacher, and indeed, if the weaknesses were of the sort that encouraged rebellion and disorder, then students were in for a long year.

I made a good job of the window. I swung until only jagged shards stuck up from the glazing, then pounded at those with the side of my hand to knock them out. Once it was started, I saw it through, every punch a jolt of electricity that charged the next blow and the next. When it was over I stood still for a while, trying to sort one version of reality from another, as though I had turned a corner and come upon a terrible wreck only to recognize myself amid the blood and broken glass.

There’s a kind of sky below the ocean –

a field of starfish, turning slowly

like cogs inside

a water-watch, wound by a sea river;

the star’s five fingers tremble and

reach for a clam’s book of meat,

into which it will inject a sedative

and then its stomach.

In The City, escaped parrots colonize

a hilltop and breed, cackling You want that

In a bag? More hits after this…

Recovery, an itch itched in every poem.

The notebook is now wholly in my head –

it was under the seat when my car was hit,

burned, blew. Unharmed and angry, I hustled home

and to the hospital to tell Dad before

he saw it on TV. His heart had been bad,

and they said that shock… “Poppa Doc” lay there,

old, cored-out, fat, and draped his feelings in odd

disaster-jokes: “your juvenilia burned –

so what? Look at me – prostrate, no prostate.”

And no story of mine could hurt him, not Dad.

Vines of blood and sugar swayed from his arms.

We watched the news. On he one-legged nighttable

I put the charred black coin of the gas cap.

I leapt up in my sleep

again they come

forms of cadavers

my father has entered

crackling the papers

crumpled by the bed

Each held what killed it

for me to inscribe

I learned the final causes

tumor clots a child a knife

I fell down sleeping

What I do and cannot do is one gesture

At dawn I tasted print

smeared across the pages.

That night my daddy came in my room and sat the edge of my bed with his back to me, his long-john shirt whitening a space in the dark. He told me that had been no man at all, but a ghost, a Confederate soldier, and I stiffened in my iron bed. Here was thick with ghosts, he told me, and told me not to be afraid, but I was, that the first one I ever saw and me maybe four years old. After he left I cried with the blanket up over my head, listening for those ghost boots slapping up the stairs.

She knows no more at that point about Jolo’s part in the recent fires than she knows why Jolo has chosen her, this last a daily source of stun. Although she does understand, a thick, thick knowledge, why she’s drawn to him. Jolo boy. With his chest ribbed like corduroy and his melted ear, his stomach and arm skin lit like glare on the river. At first it was a prickle, then a pull. Then like how hard it is to look away when the nurse’s needle enters your arm. Then, gradually, Connie learned, and, yes, it was still the skin, the rosebud ear, like a brand-new animal for Connie to handle…

You know about milksnakes, don’t ya? my grandma said.

I knew they thieved milk, sucked cows’ tits before the farmer got up in the morning. I’d seen one in our town shed, even barn-colored it was. Colored like dried cow shit walked to a powder.

Milksnakes’ll witch ye. Instermints of Satan.

A bead of red candied saliva globed up in the corner of her mouth.