Shirley

Not singsung Je-sus saves, Je-sus saves. Not Res-cue the per-ish-ing , them sitting on their Sunday evening porches, thinking idly flitting thoughts about the drunken gambling fornicating potty-mouthed idolatry. No, that was then, the see-through lady caps and men in witness shirts and trembly alto tenor coming from the empty-lot loudspeakers down the street. All’s it was was mission folks in Steelton. 1 No, now they’re going down the valley 2 one by one, with their faces toward the setting of the sun, plenty saved, scrubbed in the blood, delivered, no god-awful heat of hell. Flab sign along the street, aw. So frown their hardest possible, or put their thumb firm upside down and pump, or even open up the truck door, call the mean words out across the air, the traffic coming on and coming down the valley one by one. Open up the truck door, not just holler out the window. Hold on honey, cardboard square and cardboard handle, the wind blasts ripping past. Not Prepare to meet thy...

Me and Him and Her Just some things is all. The one picture down there nice and moonly is just what happened when her tried to take me a night photo. Dark one night, dark and they still didn’t let me in, instead her came out with the wash basket and was hanging up her things on her precious strings. In the pitch dark, yeah. Why at night I don’t know. Yeah, unrational. Her thinks her’s saving time, how? If hanging up takes the same time in the dark or the next morning sun? Then her called to him, he was bogged down in his house chair, her called “Will you weigh him? because I would like to give him some m-i-l-k.” Whatever ailed her. Like I wouldn’t know that word anywhere. So him got out of him’s chair and got me in and held me while him stood on the jiggle thing in the bathroom with the speedometer. Held me up so our chest furs met, and I must of run everything off, all the bones in the woods, so I got all Cat’s food Cat didn’t want when Cat had supper, plus especially a lo...

Applesauce, Shirley Kurtz, illustrated by Cheryl Benner, Good Books, 1992 Applesauce (cont’d) Because things change. It’s a different century. We’re mostly limping along by ourselves. No house in West Virginia anymore, backed up to a hill. No outsize garden meant to feed a tribe. The boy and the sister and the little terror of a brother all have families of their own. Three decades on, on a Sunday in September, we’re just two tired old heads. That night at supper, goes the story, they ate the last of the applesauce. All her jars were empty, the boy’s mother said. It was time to make more. Our cupboard’s not bare—we’re not Old Mother Hubbards. We still have applesauce. But we’d hate to run out.   The very next evening, when they were on the way home from town, going up Knobley Mountain, she told the father to stop the car, quick. Over there where she was pointing, in somebody’s yard, was a tree. It’s loaded. It’s neglected. Free apples? she wonders. “May...

Going By the Lady “ And that’s it,” says the lady . “That—right there—is mascarpone. Ten minutes, two ingredients. I told you it was easy.” You watch over and over. The spoon coats. The bubbles bubble. The whole big puddle pours down into the sieve lined with cheesecloth . HELP, you text the lady next day, because you cooked some but your sieve full seems too limp. You dripped it all last night in the fridge. How’s it cheese? “ You put in the lemon juice?” she ask s. Y es, y ou did. “Maybe too many cheesecloth layers?” you say. “Stir it around,” she says. “Then let it drip some more in the fridge .” It drips, drips. It makes another middling pond in the bowl, like before. But it doesn’t much stiffen. And the lady doesn’t have any you can borrow, when you ask. Your sad lump is your only hope. You take it over to her house—the whole thing—the bowl, the sieve, the draggy cloth, your so-called mascarpone. The lady pushes it around with her spoon, slaps her lips smartly. “Yep, t...

It’s not impossible, says the woman to the man in Kate’s poem —a beautiful ceremony followed by a lifetime of strife. How bad it gets isn’t clear. Just, he’s not inclined to ply her with sweet nothings, empty praises, libidinous gestures. Instead, she tells the man, you park out in our backyard, wind rifling through your branches, while I, ever the romantic, sleep safely underneath. 1 Which leaves me mulling . For it’s in a wo ods m y husband and I abide, thorned and prickly, somehow persist ing . “ You’re too chop happy,” I sometimes accuse , because h e’s forever culling, obsessed by the canopy. ( N ot enough of it? T o o preponder ant the shade? Which? Would I know?) He’s jealous for the fledglings wanting sun, I get that much. When a giant in some thunderstorm, trunk ripped, goes roaring to the ground, he’s elated. The sound, the massive crack, the tragic swish of branchery descending in slow time—for him it’s theater. He balked, though, at bringing down our yard maple...

Piggy Pink By the time we reached Pittsburgh I was enough stuffed up to crash. I looked around for the tissues box, my husband found me a wastebasket, and giving myself up to the sofa, there I mostly stayed. I kept to the one end, so as not to blow my germs on anybody, and as much as the head fog allowed, I chattered along. But you know children. They want to crowd closer and closer. In the evening, I guessed if Youngest, who loves her picture books, retreated to the area between the sofa and the wall, behind my head, I could read some stories. Then I guessed if she could get her teeth brushed and get herself to bed, I could read a little more. Upstairs, though, I didn’t slip into the bed with her. Sitting on the climb-up-to-her-bunk steps, the bed railing serving as our barrier, I read parallel to her. The other sofa in the living room, across from mine, allowed my husband and me our own infirmary suite that night. I could hew to my space. In the morning, though, family wafting to...