Search All Winners

There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,

        broke,

and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.

        By now the talk had changed.

There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.

        And x where the mirror had been.

And x where the window had been.

       And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.

There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.

ANTHONY
I’m sorry, sir.
I don’t think I understand.

MATT
She took her kid and left in the middle of the night.
To go where?
She’s in the middle of the desert.

ANTHONY
Sir, if I may.

MATT
You may.

ANTHONY
Her leaving
What does any of that have to do with us?

MATT
What does that have to do with us?
We did that, Anthony.
We broke that family up.

A moment.

MATT
Do you not understand that?

ANTHONY
It doesn’t matter what I understand, sir.

It was true that Eva’s male colleagues had by now ceased to joke among themselves that a hopeless crush on Professor Mueller ought to be included among the requirements for the major in philosophy, but this was not because the students no longer fell in love with her. They did, at a rate which had of course slackened over the years but was still not inconsiderable. It was an irony—of course quite lost on Eva, who was steadfastly oblivious to the dramas in which she figured—that many who sat raptly listening to their professor’s lectures on the “futility of the passions,” on the need to transform the passive emotions directed towards objects and people outside ourselves into the active emotions of the intellect, were swollen with an advanced case of that same passive desire whose elimination was being eloquently, even passionately, urged upon them.

Though I cannot lavish praise on stamina
            alone, I must acknowledge a femme

            fortitude. Last night, I tell myself,
a misstep at battery’s expense

so as to never consider the sentience
of a pleasure machine.

How her trembling must have lullabied
                   my drunk tongue the intricacies

                   of sexual decorum even in sleep,
how she may have throbbed

all night beside me, anticipating her
own reciprocal and tender invasion.

Her plan had been to clean in the middle of the night, so her mother would wake to an empty kitchen sink, but as she stood in the foyer, the bathroom fan beating loudly and uselessly, the mess before her made her want to cry; being in a family of eleven made her want to cry, the way someone had soaked up the dog’s pee but not thrown away the paper towel, the way responsibility divided by eleven meant no one was really responsible.