From arrest to needle, he spoke only gibberish

Old Man and Girl

• Daybreak, like a peach in August,
• breakfast at the bar, china and silver — doesn’t matter,
• he’d drink Louisiana chicory coffee out of an old
• field boot. Hand-mashed blackberry toast, chewing slowly,
• watching Ana Sofia on the veranda sweeping,
• a fickle breeze lifting her hair, letting it break
• on the shoreline of her shoulders, and her dress, white,
• rectangular, embroidered flowers, pressed to the back
• of her legs, the hem flapping at her calves,
• sweeping and sometimes stopping, sweeping and stopping,
• shifting the broom to one hand, the other floating up to her brow,
• looking at the day, at the cornfield, and he looks too.
• What does she see? he wonders. Strong green rows
• or acres and acres of dead stalks that lay like fallen soldiers?
• And what does she hear? He sees her hear something
• when she raises that hand to her brow, tilts her head.
• The voice of God? Or the wind rattling dead leaves?
• There is a kind of grief in wind-blown leaves,
• in rain after harvest.

Two Words

• In secret weekend negotiations held at La Bastide de Moustiers —
• favorite house in Provence of world-famous,
• 21 Michelin stars chef Alain Ducasse — five CEOs
• of the largest investment banks in America,
• two Federal Reserve Bank presidents,
• a top-tier US Treasury Department official,
• and four Congressmen, both parties, well-entrenched,
• came together to finalize the Plan and left the inn
• only for the occasional stroll through the ten-acre gardens.
• Not only did their whereabouts shock Americans,
• but their near-simultaneous deaths 32,000 feet
• above the Atlantic culminated in a death-penalty verdict
• for the carpenter who — five years unemployed and utterly mad
• when offered the job of mushroom slicer for that clandestine gathering,
• hired by Ducasse himself as a favor to a friend’s
• American cousin — surreptitiously replaced matsutake mushrooms
• with the slow-acting, highly-toxic amanitas.
• From arrest to needle, he spoke only gibberish
• peppered with two words —
• you’re welcome.

Anniversary

• Words swim through shallows while a salmon
• in butcher paper sails through the air, thuds,
• slides across tile, collides with lemon, ginger root, shoots
• them past the knife and wine goblet, past spring peas,

• new potatoes, all the way to the edge — over,
• lost in the shadows cast from the center island,
• lit by the window framing the lake that blackens with the setting sun.
• The tip of her finger — nail painted pink, like labia, areola,

• like salmon — slides into a fold, tears open the wrap, pulls out
• the fish, its glassy eye fixed forever up, trained now
• on the bottle of  Sauvignon Blanc meant for the glaze, empty,
• the last poured into the goblet, raised, her own eyes glassy

• peer over the rim, to the thin white gash on the skin
• of the lake cut by a sliver-sharp moon as his hour-ago
• words glide by again, swim deeper still, leave
• ever-widening ripples in their wake.

Susan Grace is an associate editor with the lit-cultural journal Fiction International. She has published in Autre Magazine and is pursuing her MFA in fiction at San Diego State University.