Afternoons were spent on the stoop eating mangos drenched with Tabasco sauce
and listening for the pop pop of guns. Neighbors nodded at the Guatemalan selling bootleg merengue tapes from a car
and knew to skirt Bus Turnaround Park where October pumpkins were bought
to see who slices the best grin. Cars sucked uncollected trash in their wakes. Curtains moved like red water in the windows.
THE ALMOST
The night brimmed with maybes. Sharp leaves shuddered in September's rickety wind. There was a heartless cat
that carried a katydid in her mouth oh so gently. There were autumn nights that slipped away in displays of red so fiery I wished the world
could roll away with the sun⎯just like that. One time a truck grazed the sedan's door, then⎯scent of rosemary sauteed in oil,
something my sister said that flattened wind, curls of wood smoke, angles of January light flooding rooms where sleep strayed, restless.
No one wants to hear stories of near misses. Those who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and lived never wanted to try dying again;
they claimed to have killed the darkness and to have risen into a second, better life.
THE CITIES WHERE I MEET YOU
Let it be Miami, Baltimore, New York. Let fruits of the osage-orange tree crack. Do you smell their acrid perfume soiling air?
Let wind shovel the clouds aside until they grey the west with rain. Let it be the city of love, of heartache,
of longing. Let rain pelt me. Let sidewalks buckle under you, and I will ask what is it like to die.
Let me introduce this husband I love. Let me show you this son who is not to be. At night you're here;
the shadows move in the corners, and I believe in them like a god. This is the dark. This is my hand
extended to touch your arm, passing through your ghostly body.
Deborah Ager's writing has appeared in The Bloomsbury Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, The North American Review, Talisman Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and is the founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine (www.32poems.com).
