 |
Eric Gudas's poems, essays, and literary interviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Crazyhouse, and Iowa Review, and he is the author of Beautiful Monster (Swan Scythe, 2003).
|
 |
|
 |
Published Fall 2006
 
945 Pecan Place
Since ten you've been standing behind a cash register, passing vermicelli,
skim milk, chicken breasts, and bottles
Of carbonated water over the scanner's secret red eye. "Will that be ATM
or credit? Would you like a bag?" Before noon
An embalmed-looking woman, her nails lacquered purple, held up your
line asking for "a small bag of cat litter—
You've only got the large ones." This Sunday afternoon squeaks by on a
conveyer belt, counted out in pennies and clammy nickels;
Wan sunlight across the asphalt and squashes' lichen green are the colors
you survive on while the clock's minute hand
Twitches, stuck, at 1:32. Back home, I gulp down toaster waffles and
lukewarm coffee, not even changing
Out of yesterday's socks, caught in a paperback Trollope's sticky pages.
Will Violet Effingham marry "comely" Phineas
Or the red-bristled reprobate, Lord Chiltern? I jerk the silver band up to
my knuckle and back, the letters
Of our names stamped inside it collecting sweat and tiny bits of skin.
Our names are also printed on the checks
We wrote all yesterday afternoon: $68.74 to Pacific Bell, $45 to Sutter
Medical, etc.; now our bank account is empty
As Griffin's water dish. After I fill it up, he runs over to drink in one long,
barely-punctuated slurp, then ambles off,
Leaving a trail of drool-drops. On the day-long drive home from our
wedding, he lay crammed in the backseat
With the luggage, barely able to stretch his legs. By Ashland, bored as he
was, we started singing interstate ditties—
"There goes a gas station, here comes a cow"; after a while we petered off
into silence, Redding and the flatlands still
Hours ahead. The next day I squatted in the driveway to scrape a thick
layer of squashed bugs from the fender
With a toothbrush. Was it only four months ago? The vastness of our
lives—our life —pools about me till it seems
We have spent years in this run-down suburban house, our paychecks
never lasting long enough, too tired most nights
To do any more than hold each other in the dark, while Griffin wheezes
plaintively. But love, common
As the oranges on our neighbors' tree, spreads half-unseen beneath,
around us, even as you stand waiting
For the credit card authorization to pass along hundreds of miles of
telephone line, your eyes fixed on the stacked
Shopping baskets, while I sit folding laundry in the bedroom, impatient
for your worn-out footsteps at the door.
|
|
|
|
MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
|
|
