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10 eavesdripping hour, sunday afternoon I’m writing this as if it were happening right now and it is though there’s no way of accounting on even the most newly fangled computer program for the legal pad & scrawl inherited from beloveds—drip, drip, drip-drip go the holes in the gutter though the squall’s coming sidelong through the sunlight that shellacs the green plastic turtle sandbox recently unearthed/unsnowed by a balmy week along with the toy wreckage of my son who’s napping in his ship-cabin of a room, dark blue curtains closed, a portal of cyan light leaking through (cyan his word learned from a washable Crayola marker) while his sister nurses, nodding at their mother’s breast on the beige stain-guarded couch near the iPod playing Evans’ Sunday Live at the Vanguard— Wouldn’t it be fabulous to hear some jazz, I say, on a Sunday afternoon and not Sunday night so that you wouldn’t have to go to sleep but got to walk around all evening with the music— but talking to Mary while watching these odd figures spill out across the yellow paper I’ve woken her, though she musters a smile as she hands me our daughter here three weeks now 11 and as my narration slips further behind real-time slaps a slice of bread into the KitchenAid toaster oven and begins talking into her cell phone to someone she must know well because I hear postpartum and not exactly but she wasn’t doing well as I adjust the sidelong cradled girl, her feet straddling my elbow, warm head in my palm like a perfect clay cup of tea, her skull’s pulsing soft spot so thin I can see, in the right light, into the sinless machinery of an infant’s brain and immerse myself in the bath of self-pity I’ve been drawing my entire life, but before I can lie down in it here comes the clap of the boy’s bare feet against hardwood, not the sound of horsemen’s stallions’ hooves striking the hardening ground but small five-toed feet and he’s in my lap, latent dreams swirling behind his eyes asking what are you doing and can you draw a monster van inside your poem, a monster van with all four of us inside! And so I do, I draw it but instead of sketching our faces in the window write “w/all four of us,” ashamed as I am of how much fuel it would take to get us anywhere in that American nuclear family carrier and picture the almost-president’s face leering beside video of deteriorating icecaps and know it’s not right to feel this warm on a winter day but I do. ...

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