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  • Sunday Paper
  • Michael McFee (bio)

We’d save change all week for one, a heavy handfulof quarters carried to the old Main Street drugstorein our college town, lifting a Times or Post or Globe

from the gray stack by the door and swapping coinsfor the big-city Sunday paper we’d haul back homelike a newborn in our arms, the inky musk of newsprint

pulled off the deafening presses just a few hours agomingling with coffeepot fumes as we two spreadall the sections across our thrift-shop kitchen table:

I took Sports or Arts, she went for News or Business,we made slippery piles of the rest and started to readslowly, like the idle rich, behind tall opened sheets

held before our faces, windows intently peered into,now and then sharing a clever phrase or headline,a peculiar detail from a wedding story or obituary,

the title of a foreign movie we wished we could see,the name of a place that seemed worth traveling to,though mostly the rustly uplifting and unfolding

was the soundtrack for each week’s quietest morning,the words written and edited and made into pagesthen assembled and delivered into our open hands

leaving their mark on the fingertips we held them with,with which we’d read each other later that holy day,that smudgy touching sure proof of our worldliness. [End Page 168]

Michael McFee

Michael McFee has new poems in The Hudson Review and Tar River Poetry as well as new essays in EPOCH and Southern Cultures. He has published fourteen books, most recently That Was Oasis. He teaches poetry writing at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

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