THE AVOIDANCE OF TROUBLE

She was going to avoid trouble today, by God. There would be no car accidents or drownings; no falls from bicycles, skateboards, scooters, in-line skates, shopping carts, or tree houses. The day would not end with bloody knees, a broken arm, a torn spleen or a broken heart. She would not be injured by touching something sharp, hot, electrical, or by the ingestion of poison. If she bled to death it would be from some spontaneous event caused by nature and not man, in secret, on her couch with the shades drawn, watching a reality-based television show (with no laugh tracks or applause) about ordinary fat girls who want to be skinny but still eat ice cream and have naturally large breasts.

No one would lure her from the house. No ball through the window, no matter of life and death, no screaming ambulance at her door, no raging fire on the back porch, no boom-boom-boom from the center of town would temp her to move. She would not answer the phone, not listen to anyone's spiel about needing time to deal with an inner turmoil hidden just below the surface. No one would dump her today, her eyes would not swell with tears over a secret, unrequited love.

She would from this day remain the sweetheart of the world, a mood of calm and serenity surrounding her body and mind, having just yesterday survived a "specific, identifiable, unexpected, unusual and unintended external action" which occurred "naturally" and as an "act of God" (according to her mother), without any apparent or deliberate cause on her part, but which caused severe and "marked effects" upon the body of her finance that may have been avoided or prevented (according to the insurance company) had circumstances leading up to the accident been recognized, and acted upon, prior to its occurrence.

From this day forward she would follow "The Swiss Cheese" model of accident causation which, according to her research, hypothesizes that most accidents can be traced to one or more of four levels of failure: Organization, supervision, precondition, and the unsafe act itself. Her model against failure would be a series of barriers, represented as slices of Swiss cheese (these barriers being the front door, the lock on the door, the drawn shades, and a dark house inviting no one to enter).

The holes in the cheese slices would represent her individual weaknesses (a broken heart, accidental ingestion of Clorox bleach, a near drowning in the bathtub, a knife dropped on her foot, and a scalding hot burn on the palm of her hand from the eye of the stove). The system as a whole (her body), she now realized, would produce failures when all of the holes in each of the slices of cheese momentarily aligned, permitting (in British psychologist James T. Reason's words) "a trajectory of accident opportunity".

So that, some hazard (like a knife-wielding fiance with a head injury, bloody knees and a torn spleen from a one-person car accident) might pass through all of the holes in her cheese (by knocking on the door softly and talking sweetly), invading all of her defenses, leading to a catastrophic failure of life and a boom-boom-boom from her bedroom representing the imperfections in her individual safeguards or defenses,

which, in the real world, rarely approached the ideal of being complete proof against the particular kind of trouble she was trying so desperately to avoid today.

GANGSTERISH

"I don't know why you're doing it at that level," he said. "You're not advanced. You're a beginner. Intermediate, maybe, on a good day.""

She was sitting on her knees, a bowl of ice cream on her desk. She scratched her neck with the tip of her thumb, trying to ignore him. "If you're going to say something to me," she said, "don't mumble. I can't really hear you over the music."

She turned up the volume on her iPod and pulled the headphones more closely over her ears. If she could just focus on the screen. If he would just go away. If he were just living somewhere else, this would be easier. She thought about the word: gangsterish. She could use gangster in a sentence without any problem. But gangsterISH? What did that even mean? Sort of like a gangster but not really? Trying to be a gangster? Appearing like a gangster but not meaning to? It was even hard to spell.

She tried again to focus on the screen. She typed. Erased. Then typed again. He looks a bit more gangsterish in his stance, but he still manages to hit the target on almost every shot.

She felt him standing behind her. She gritted her teeth.

"I can't believe you just typed that," he said. He laughed. She wanted to kick him in the face, but she'd need more leg room for that. She was in her "writing room" which was really just a walk-in closet. The kind of "writing room" you see converted on decorating shows in one hour but hers took two months.

She imagined herself as Bruce Lee. A kick to the face and a few back flips. That would take care of him. Pow! Smack! Right in the face. And she would not feel guilty. Bruce Lee never felt guilty. Feeling guilty was for pussies.

He walked back to the kitchen and opened the freezer. He spun around on the hard wood floor, his bare socks sliding with ease.

"What happened to that bottle of peppermint schnapps that was in the freezer?" he yelled over his music. He was wearing an iPod also. Sometimes she wondered why they bothered talking out loud at all. Maybe they could learn sign language, or just scribble things on those miniature white boards she had seen at the Dollar Tree: You dumb ape, go away or Me want less you.

"Peppermint schnapps?" he said again. "Hello?"

She erased the previous sentence and typed a few more words on the screen: im da most gangsteRish peRson deR is neegRo.

"You gave it to your fishing buddy," she said. "The one with the thing on his nose."

He walked up behind her, breathing on her neck, his watery blond hair smelling like her strawberry shampoo.

"What the fuck does that mean?" he asked. He pointed to the screen, leaving a fingerprint behind. She sighed deeply.

"I don't know," she said. "It's a hard word to use in a sentence. Why don't you fuckin' try it?"

He paused for a moment. "You use fuck a lot lately," he said. "I don't like it when you say fuck."

"For fuck's sake, use the fuckin' word in a sentence already. What are you? You fuckin' pussy?" She smiled.

He stared at her. His mouth a straight line. She could hear the bass of his music through his ear plugs. She hated ear plugs.

"Okay," he said. He turned down his music. "In films," he said, "Lettieri was generally typecast in blunt, gangsterish roles. One of his more prestigious assignments was the part of Sollolo in The Godfather."

"Does everthing have to do with the Godfather?" she asked. "Can't one fuckin' thing be about something happy?"

"No," he said, spinning again. "The Godfather is life. Can you believe Michael Jackson is dead?"

"I can't believe he was still alive," she said.

He turned up his music.

"How is your sentence better than my first one?" she asked. But he had already walked away, grabbing his crotch, his hips swaying.

"Watch me do the moonwalk," he said.

He slid across the floor, his eyes closed in concentration.

She closed one eye in a hard squint. "Pow!" she said outloud, snapping her elbow and extending her hand to cover the figure of his body.

He didn't hear her, didn't turn around. "More leg room," she said. If only I had more leg room."

THE COMPETITION

Two people, tight-lipped, glossy nail polish shining against the strain of worn boxers. Her clogs strewn across the floor. He always hated them. Ugly shoes. Pseudo shoes. Faze them out of the wardrobe. Get a pair of real shoes, for Christ's sake. Get a pair of pink high heels, black stilletos, get some of those sexy underwear with the flap, the funny flap in the crotch or better yet no crotch. Let me see you lurk somewhere, be mysterious. Why are you so tight-lipped? Be gone. Jesus, is that the best you can do? Is that? The best? Is that you lurking now? Is that you being mysterious? Pink lips parted? Jesus. That is the best. Yes. I love your ugly clogs and your grandma panties with the flapless crotch and your pink glossy nail polish, all shining against the strain of my worn boxers. Sweet Jesus. You win.

PROMPT

Alice sat staring at the mole in the palm of her hand while sipping a very hot cup of vanilla latte.

"Does this look like a smashed fly?" she asked him.

His eyes were somewhat crossed.

"Fuck, yeah," he said.

He was wearing loafers, a spot of dried blood on the toe; and a pastel shirt the color of lime sherbert.

"Are my feet too big?" he asked.

He was still feeling a bit loopy from the drugs. He looked at the tip of his index finger, a deep cut beneath the layers of guaze. "The X-ray was negative?" It was a statement but said like a question with that little flip at the end. She hated that.

"Yes," she said, "negative."

"Good thing," he said. He took a sip of coffee, his finger held out, the tip sewn on with care by a young female doctor just graduated from Johns Hopkins. "Zesty!" he said loudly. Then he laughed. "Non-joiner," he whispered to the table and then giggled, "it's a non-joiner finger."

"Whatever that means," said Alice. She rolled her eyes and looked away, across the street at two Hispanic men working on the installation of a modern art piece in front of the community center.

An old woman standing at the counter turned around. He smiled. "Don't worry," he said, "she didn't mean to run me over with the Ski-Doo. It was a total accident."

"Steven," she said, "if you keep saying things like that, people are going to believe you."

He smiled. Handsome as ever, put his chin into the palm of his hand, and closed his eyes.

I am marveling, these days, at what has been given to me, and what has been taken away. It seems very arbitrary, which seems a conclusion I should have come to long ago. But I am a slow learner, as evidenced by my constant state of failure, and my belief that somewhere, someone actually finds this failure an interesting topic of conversation over coffee.

You let them get to you, with their teen pregnancies and failing grades and their acne and their car crashes and their trips to court. You let their problems become your own and now you have a permanent headache because this is not what you were meant to be. This is not your destiny (even though it's already happened) and this is not the greatness you are destined for at all. You were meant for great speeches on green lawns surrounded by neatly trimmed rose bushes, for lovely, fresh-faced children from all the right families singing your praises in poetic verse, not these children. Not these illegal vagabonds who came sneaking across the border, lying about their names and then not taking advantage of this supreme education you offer them. What a dedicated employee you have been, trying to teach them how to say "yes" and "no" in all the right places, how to fill in all the right bubbles on standardized tests that you refuse to let your own daughter take. You have been a genius, telling them how they could have everything they wanted if they just tried, because this is America, this is where all dreams come true. If only you work hard enough.

a delightful place
finds us in the vastness
of the darkened sky:
the solitary architecture of the trees,
the changing coloration of the stars,
the twinkling of the lights,
the slender shape of my hips
with their complicated rigging
to which your body lends these
sometimes harmonious, lazy half-circles
from the palm of your hand, warm
and sometimes hidden,
to serve within my soul a taste,
but only just so,
for the man who of mysterious pleasure
in contemplating, while lying
on my bed and resting on his elbows
still has the strength of will
to know my desire.

There are things in the night sky
that can tell you what to do
next

there are sounds in the air
that can whisper the answer to you
softly

there are smells that say
exactly what you want
to know

if only you knew how
to see it
and hear it
and smell it

without telling it how
to go about doing everything
better.

BETTER BIRDS

There are birds on the bird feeder. And we are excited.

We have bought seed.

We have hung small houses made of plastic and large houses made of cedar from black metal poles with graceful arms that curve and swirl and twist.

We have read books. They have told us what to do.

We have seen a cardinal, bright red. And then a robin. And then more robins. And then doves and then more doves and then blue jays.

We have put seed on the sidewalk for the cardinals and thrown our strawberry tops into the grass for the catbirds and we have moved an antique cement bird bath just near it all. And we have waited patiently.

We have waited so patiently at the glass door. Then by the window in the living room and then too at the windows from the second floor looking down at the plastic feeders and the cedar feeders and the strawberry tops and the old cement bird bath sitting just near.

We have told each other: stop talking, be still, stop moving, sit down, I can't see.

We have put a plastic container meant to hold sandwiches in the bird bath because it holds water and the antique cement bird bath does not.

We have bought journals and drawn pictures of cardinals and blue jays and some bird we did not know that turned out to be a sparrow.

We have bought more books: books that identify the birds and books that make the songs of birds and books that tell how to attract more birds. Better birds.

We have wanted better birds.

We will always want

better birds.