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Susan Keith retired early due to worsening Multiple Sclerosis symptoms, after fifteen years of practicing corporate law. Since then she has pursued her lifelong dream of writing.
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Published Spring 2007
 
Tombstones
I got my first tombstone from a dead woman.
Can you believe it?
That's what they call them.
Tombstones.
Little Lucite cubes
tossed as parting gifts upon a financial deal's closing.
My midtown Manhattan law firm
specialized in predaciousness—
corporate mergers and acquisitions.
"M&A" lawyers' offices
stored a superabundance of booty:
inscribed gold pens, engraved plaques, walnut boxed clocks,
trinkets from all the deals that closed.
I was a tax lawyer,
a bench warmer.
Even when green young M&A lawyers
whistled for us, we sprang to attention,
their obedient retrieval dogs.
After three years
where days and nights were synonymous,
I had learned not to expect
a pat on the head. I
don't remember her name. I'd
only revised a few of her pages. She'd
been dead
a month the day I
received the tombstone
from the deal she'd closed. She'd
fallen playing soccer in Central Park and "sucked it up,"
like one of the guys, ignoring
the pain and swelling in her
knee, to close the deal...her deal.
The blood clot closed
her heart.
I opened the card-
board box not knowing
what it contained.
I shut the box, and
laid
her tombstone
to rest way back in my top desk drawer. |
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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.
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