Category: Uncategorized

I took my time walking home tonight because the weather was lovely and I had no need to rush. I stopped for dinner; I picked up laundry; I meandered.

I overheard two men from college speaking:
A: Where is your girlfriend tonight?
B: At some ritual. Who celebrates the crescent moon, anyways?

I overheard one college guy talking to his two friends:
I have trouble figuring out where we are in the relationship. Are we just friends? Is it more? What does it mean when I flirt with her, and how much flirting is okay? … etc…. How do I know?

And, being a busybody, I interrupted: “You ask.”
He looked at me incredulously: “You ask?”
“You ask.”
“That sounds more difficult.”
“Well, good luck with it.”

On the way to pick up my laundry, I passed one man getting up into the another man’s face:
“…children are turning against their parents.
These are the days when wives are turning against their husbands…”

One the way back, they were laughing together like the best of friends.

As I passed the mosque, I was stopped and anointed with oil scented through the grace of Allah.

The Egg Suckers
– by Steve Scafidi, found in his collection, For Love of Common Words

To the snakes and the rats and the weasels
who skulk and tunnel and dig underneath
the moon and the earth to find the shiny
white ovum of their dreams lying there

warmed under the hen who coughs a little
moving away in the darkness of the gold
hay and the dust of my chicken coop
I say hello now from about fifty feet away

in my writing room and the beginning of Spring
for you are the egg suckers, the midnight
takers-away, the despised and slinky
snoopers, the geniuses of the world who

will be here when we are no more —
you who move with such deliberation,
what you want eventually you get, hauling
the precious cargo gently between your jaws

moving back down through the hole you dug
cradling the egg, tonguing and sucking on
the white egg I was to gather and I was
to eat and the poor hen with her one

eye open wide watches you come and go
as she watches me reach my hand beneath her
in the morning and hold this small compact
beautiful form up to the sun to admire

the subtle brown of the egg and the perfect
religious fit of it in my palm and I roll it
across my kitchen table in the morning
before I crack it open and pour the egg

into my skillet and fry it openly thanking
the holiness of the hen, this exotic bird
roosting here whose children I eat everyday
over-easy with black pepper and a spoon.