Louise Glück / Midnight

 

Midnight

by Louise Glück

Louise Glück / Medianoche

Speak to me, aching heart: what

Ridiculous errand are you inventing for yourself

Weeping in the dark garage

With your sack of garbage: it is not your job

To take out the garbage, it is your job

To empty the dishwasher. You are showing off

Again,

Exactly as you did in childhood—where

Is your sporting side, your famous

Ironic detachment? A little moonlight hits

The broken window, a little summer moonlight,

Tender

Murmurs from the earth with its ready

Sweetnesses—

Is this the way you communicate

With your husband, not answering

When he calls, or is this the way the heart

Behaves when it grieves: it wants to be

Alone with the garbage? If I were you,

I’d think ahead. After fifteen years,

His voice could be getting tired; some night

If you don’t answer, someone else will answer.

Protest Chant 2020 by Jennifer Michael Hecht

 

Protest Chant 2020

by Jennifer Michael Hecht

How was the blindfold supposed to help?
Was it one last moment alone with yourself?

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet and historian of science and culture. Her poetry books include Who Said (Copper Canyon), Funny (Wisconsin), and The Next Ancient World (Tupelo); and her poetry appears in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The Kenyon Review. Hecht holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and her prose books include Stay: A History of Suicide (Yale) and Doubt: A History (HarperOne). She’s writing a book on poetry after religion for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

TIN HOUSE

Geoffrey Brock / Mezzo cammin

Mezzo cammin

by Geoffrey Brock

Today, as I jogged down the center line 
of a closed-off, rain-glossed road, lost in a rhythm, 
the memory of a boy returned: fifteen

or so, barefoot in faded cut-off jeans, 
sprinting past neighbors’ houses, tears drifting 
into his ears, heart yanking at its seams—

he hoped they’d rip and didn’t slow at all 
for more than a mile. After crossing Mission,
the boy collapsed beneath an oak, his whole

body one cramp. (But later the secret smile, 
imagining Guinness there—the clock-men stunned!) 
Twenty years gone, that race so vivid still,

yet I can’t for the life of me recall the gun:
who was it, or what, that made me start to run?

Practical Joke by Brian Barker

 

Practical Joke 

by Brian Barker

Brian Barker / Broma

The crows worked all night disassembling, then reassembling, a man’s car. By dawn it perched on the roof of his house in perfect working condition. The man knew not to get angry. He walked whistling to the curb, climbed into an imaginary car, made some engine noises, and drove off to work. As he slept that night, the crows countered. A man was messier than a car, and they squabbled about what went where. The next morning, the neighbors thought it the damnedest thing. A car on a roof, radio blaring. A man propped behind the wheel, an arm ending in a foot dangling carefree from the window. An ass in place of a face, sporting sunglasses, staring into endless blue sky.