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My ex answers your call like shit is sweet, says, Good to hear from you, so fake you want to reach through the receiver. Next thing, she drops the phone minus nary a pardon and leaves you on an indefinite hold soundtracked by the blare of some rap video cranked beyond good sense. Meanwhile, you carry the noisy cordless into another room, crack the blinds, and watch a pair of baseheads, both thin as antennas, push a half-wrecked sedan down the street. The baseheads, they’ve got the sedan’s doors flung open, and seethe at each other across a scrappy ragtop roof. Farther, they jog their hooptie to a slow cruise, jump in on the run, and sputter off. It’s still plenty of lightweight action on the set. The old lady dressed in a who-gives-a-what-about-the-heat getup (down coat, snow boots, thick wool scarf) tugging a shopping cart full of thrashed cans. Down a ways, boys riding wheelies for distance on dirt bikes with mismatched rims.

no one wants to admit it but you just

might end up one day in the wrong

place at the wrong time and some

evil shit rains down on you

and maybe you get

crippled or blind

or plain old

dead and

not one soul will give a good goddamn

because they can soothe them-

selves with a wrung out prayer

about wrong places and

wrong times, when

even as they’re

thinking that

they know

that everywhere is the wrong place

and every hour is the wrong hour

and that bad breaks don’t seek

you out; they’re always there

waiting to swing into action

like a traitor limb you

didn’t even know

you had

When I say my wives are cages, I don’t mean I’m a bird.

Collapsible shelves, they hide their usefulness when not

in use. All my wives contain terrariums: terrible and fetid

atmospheres in which their salamander selves linger atop

damp rocks. Their hands are damp as the tissues they ball

in their hands, though none of my wives could make a fist,

not even if I asked, no, not even if I commanded them to,

an amusing idea I must someday revisit. My wives are like

the Small Mammal House at the zoo, their rooms kept dark

so visitors may view their nocturnal truths, that anonymous

wakefulness we sleepers do not care to know. None of my

wives are like lanterns, nor do their ribs sing with canaries...

Maybe he pictured just the nail,

the slight swirl in the center of the head and raised

the hammer, and brought it down with fury and with skill

and sank it with a single blow.

Not a difficult truck for a journeyman, no harder

than figuring stairs or a hip-and-valley roof

or staking out a lot, but neither is a house,

a house is just a box fastened with thousands of nails.

He tried to swerve around her but, instead, went into a slide. The reds and yellows in the road stretched out. Cottonwood leaves roared in his head. His bowels shuddered. Even before he struck the girl and hurled her into the creek bed, he felt all the familiar habits of the world begin to recede.