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Our father comes in wearing his gorilla mask and hands, swinging his arms and beating his chest. My sister puts her hands over her plate. Our father pushes her hands away, grabs at her food and pokes sauerkraut through the mouth hole in his mask. He moves around the table, swiping food from the paper plates and guzzling from the cups. Near my mother he bangs his head on the knickknack shelf and one of the snow globes falls and breaks on the floor. It’s the one with the satellite inside.

When our father comes near me, I slide down under the table, but he pulls me back up by his hairy rubber hands. I don’t say anything. He likes being the gorilla. After dinner, when he takes off the mask and hands, his face will be flushed and there will be tears in his eyes.

A military truck speeds through the intersection, children

                                     shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled

          through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog

                     lies panting in the road. Its hind legs

                                                                         crushed into the shine

                                            of a white Christmas.

On the bedstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard

                                                                   for the first time.

I do not know how I need the air,

or if it needs me. The lost air,

the air which is smashed, like a red hat.

When the sun rises the amnesty

of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,

the maroon horses - when the sun rises

the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard

with a thumb on top.

Panther. Painter. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more people claim they have caught a glimpse of it: a pale sliver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the next. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.

The congregation began to rustle in preparation for Sister Pearl. Sister Pearl had been the choir headmistress for forever and a day. She claimed many times that she lost her voice singing for the devil. Sometime in her twenties she decided she wanted to sing the dirty blues, like Aretha Franklin. She quit the church and started singing along the Chitlin Circuit in Chattanooga, Nashville, Louisville, and on up to Chicago. One day, she said, the Lord took her voice away, and that’s when she returned to church.