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Shaindel Beers teaches at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon. Her poetry, fiction, and social commentary have appeared in Poetry Miscellany, Hunger Mountain, and the Willow Review. She is the poetry editor of Contrary Magazine.
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Published Spring 2007
 
The Thermophobic's Wife
Twenty years in the steel mill, and now he can't
keep cool enough. She does everything she can—
has a cold shower running at the first crunch of gravel,
lets him sleep naked on top of white eyelet sheets
under the fan, the thermostat turned down to fifty.
When they make love she takes a stainless steel bowl
from the pot and pan cabinet, sets it on the nightstand,
full of ice, takes the slippery cubes between her lips,
her fingers. They become a part of her as she tends to him.
She is a nurse, a wife, of ice.
She has wanted to take him on a vacation to see Hank's grave,
and now that he has spent his life in hot as hell
five days a week since age nineteen, he won't go south
of Indianapolis for anything—daughters' weddings, nephews'
funerals. She can't convince him that these places are not hot
all year round. He's a take-no-chances kind of man.
His need for cold means she will tend runt piglets
under the heat lamp in the kitchen,
yellow chicks in incubators;
she is the caretaker of greenhouse
tomatoes, the sage and rosemary that soak up the meager
Midwestern sun while he toils in red hot, white hot.
She has built her life around the cold—
the grey blue house, the white trim, the dark wood—
her life has been winter as long as she can remember,
and she prays that it is a long time,
a cold day in hell or heaven
or the north woods of Wisconsin, wherever he will go
when he is gone.
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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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