hannah and mamie had never met. they were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

okay, i'm teaching a forms class. apparently. only i didn't exactly know that until recently. so, instead of, say, immersing them in the ghazal, we're reinventing the poetic device. (shut it. stop laughing. hannah's having her classes write beer jingles. so there.) and really, jarvis, in a fractured world such as this, how can me saying that you're like a moon stapled in the sky really contain all that you are? all that i want to say you are?

closing time at the second avenue deli

this is the time of night of the delicatessen
when the manager is balancing a nearly empty ketchup bottle
upside-down on a nearly full ketchup bottle
and spreading his hands slowly away
from the perfect balance like shall i say
a priest blessing the balance, the achievement
of perfect emptiness, of perfect fullness? no,
this is a kosher delicatessen. the manager
is not like. he is not like a priest,
he is not even like a rabbi, he
is not like anyone else except the manager
as he turns to watch the waitress
discussing the lamb stew with my wife,
how most people eat the whole thing,
they don't take it home in a container,
as she mops up the tables, as the
cashier shall i say balances out?
no. the computer does all that. this
is not the time for metaphors. this is the time
to turn out the lights, and yes,
imagine it, those two ketchup bottles
will stand there all night long
as acrobatic metaphors of balance,
of emptiness, of fullness perfectly contained,
of any metaphor you wish unless
the manager snaps his fingers at the door,
goes back, and separates them for the night
from that unnatural balance, and the store goes dark
as my wife says should we take a cab
or walk, the stew is starting to drip already.
shall i say that the container can not
contain the thing contained anymore? no.
just that the lamb stew is leaking all across town
in one place: it is leaking on the floor of the taxi-cab,
and that somebody is going to pay for this ride.

alan dugan

*side note: this week we're reading nin andrews' any kind of excuse and terrance hayes' wind in a box. i figure if we're talking forms, we might as well start with prose poems and move into verse? anyway, we're talking about terrance hayes. or i'm talking. and my hair's getting crazy. and i'm comparing him to c.k. williams in the way his narrative moves into the meditative. only he's better and younger and his is the complex story of a post-civil rights black man. and really what i mean is that i'd like to marry him...only everyone's kind of laughing. and i think at me...until someone starts humming "dick in a box" but then changing the words to "wind in a box." and now nothing, nothing will ever be the same.
and also, also, Hot College Student wrote a poem about a fat shirtless guy watching the packers game in the freezing cold. it's a letter actually, a direct address. but it moves into this thing about how men are always giving women their jackets, but then the women complain about being hot because we can complain about anything. it ends, though, with this turn. "isn't it us, though, really? looking around for something to give to a woman other than a jacket?" anyway, it turned out pretty beautiful.