Search All Winners

MR. GREEN: Two verbs! Granted, they are irregular. But that’s no excuse, for these forms —

Do. Not. Change.

They are immutable!

More reliable than the people in your lives. More stable than governments. More dependable than churches or philosophies. These verbs are your deliverance!

Commit these patterns to memory. Determine the person, the number, the tense. Then remember the form. That’s all there is. To conjugation.

Conjugation. Such a beautiful word. Such a beautiful act. 

In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.

Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press

In this wet season my gone mother

climbs back again

and everything here smells gutted—

bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,

our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling

this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared

orphans out bleating with the mongrels,

                                    all of us starved

for something reclaimable. What chases them,

her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,

shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.

I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s

neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,

her tar this same fish odor I am washing.

I know I am one of them. The emptied.

Mano’s job at the water treatment plant was easy and relentlessly boring—most days she wondered why they kept a receptionist at all. The water treatment facility was spared the public wrath of, say, the utilities department, where citizens regularly marched themselves down in person to shout about their bills. Nobody came to the water treatment office. People rarely called. She sipped the coffee while watching a few trout glide behind the glass of the tank that took up half the wall opposite her desk. Trout did better in the river’s upper sections, where the water was colder, but they could be found in the river down here as well, and Lloyd insisted on having a few in the office tank. Recently, the city had cut the budget for the tank service contractor, and she and Keith had both been pretending they didn’t notice how filthy things were getting in there. 

One way Mano passed the time was to spend hours, on-the-clock, with her oil pastels, working to capture the rosy blush of trout gills, the way the red stripe along the side of the greenbacks faded in and out, almost woven through the deep green-brown skin, the way the rainbows kept a consistent blush that practically glowed. She’d named every rainbow trout in the tank Stevie Nicks, while the greenback cutthroats were all Lindsey Buckinghams. The tank, full of river water, was meant to display the health of the ecosystem, but it also served as an early warning system. If something was killing fish in the river, it killed the fish in the tank, too.