Hard Work

Young Poets Feature Hard Work · John Skoyles This morning I have awakened in New York while the population of California still sleeps. A woman I once knew very well pulls the covers around her shoulders in Los Angeles, while I buy the paper and a coffee-to-go in this city where we lived together. This room was ours, we shared it, and used to lie in bed and guess who cried behind these plaster walls, who stumbled on the stairs late at night. This morning as I woke up in New York, schoolboys at bus stops exchanged the facts of life, and the headlines said there's a plane crash in the south, those passengers seated beside each other gone to different cemeteries without exchanging another word. This room was ours, but I kept all of it, daydream near the electric fan, visit those tenants who kept us awake and play cards with them, sullen men with nothing on their minds but the good luck that deals them three of a kind, the bad luck that makes them experts at bluffing. The Missouri Review ...