Italian Women

(for P. F. Kluge)

My grandmother died in the shavings and crumbs of the newspaper clippings we stripped from her wall, long before her family checked her into Mercy Hospital, long before her mouth hung open in a room white as salt. When we moved her outside the city, when we settled her in a modern wood home with no stairs and an electric oven, in a neighborhood of the near-dead, she’d already given up the ghost. It was after her house finally sold, on that night in June: we peeled the skin from her kitchen, pulled the teeth from her living room.

Memory’s not like rewinding a tape—it’s a feeling like gas rising from the stomach to the throat, a feeling like standing up after a dinner of gnocchi and three glasses of red wine and wincing as blood and drunkenness flood the head.

Apology Essay to the State of Ohio

In high school I arranged for a streaker to run through our graduation. His getaway car was pulled over, ironically, for speeding, and the cops found him naked in the backseat with “2005 YEAR OF THE COCK” painted on his stomach. He was arrested and the court sentenced him to do eight hours’ community service and write an apology essay. I wrote the essay.

What I Learned from My Mistake (and What Must Be Done to Avoid Future Temptation)

By R__ H_____

Dear State of Ohio,

Franklin and Chambers

Men wearing orange safety vests crowded Marvin Campos’s funeral service. Surrogate fathers, brothers, sons: the old ones kept composure, the young tried.

Steel dust was as thick in the air as the July humidity. The men scraped dust residue, gunpowder-colored, from deep crevices in toughened palms; they whisked it in the air out of habit. When the men sneezed, they sent clouds like exhaust fumes to float in the light from the church window, each dust particle suddenly visible and distinct. Muscles of air lifted clusters of dust, which settled on a shoulder, on a discarded coat, onto hair. Steel stuck to sweat. Grey glaze on a forehead. Chunks of it dropped into the throat from the nasal cavity. The men blew black snot into tissues.