The Idealists: Part VII

The Idealists – Part VII


“We have a window of about four months,” Ruthie says. “After that, the drugs will start to damage my ovaries.”

They are sitting in Ruthie’s office between classes.

“Are we sure we want to take that risk?” Derick asks.

“Dr. Park says if I don’t do it now, I’m not doing it,” Ruthie says.

“Well,” Derick says, “If we wait till the summer, that will mean the baby will be born in the summer, so we won’t have to miss classes.”

“True,” Ruthie says with her lips, but not her eyes. “I mean,” she adds, “What if we’re no good at parenting?”

“We are essentially parents to almost 200 kids,” Derick says.

“Yeah, but we can send them away and lock the door every so often. You can’t do that with your own kid.”

“You’ll be a great mom, Ruthie.”

“We’ve never even had a pet. I mean, a dog or something would give us a taste of what it would be like to have to care for another life.”

“We’re allergic to dogs. And you’re asthmatic.”

“What about hypo-allergenic dogs?”

“They look pretty annoying. How about a bird?”

“Birds poop everywhere. And hypo-allergenic dogs are cute!”

“I don’t think you can find those kinds of dogs at the pound.”

The bell rings, and they both scramble to get to their classrooms.

After classes, they sneak home and lock the doors. Derick rented a movie—the kind with lots of explosions that they both liked—and they settle in to watch it a full fifteen minutes before someone knocks on the door.

“I’m not getting it,” Ruthie says.

“Might be important,” Derick says, “The world might be exploding.”

Ruthie flashes him a mock-annoyed look and then exits their den to answer the door. Derick follows her.

“It’s students,” she says over her shoulder, opening the door.

“I’m shocked,” Derick says.

“And they have a cage,” Ruthie says.

Derick gently moves Ruthie aside and the girls glide in. One sets a plastic bag on the floor and together, they carry the cage to a table in the den.

“Thanks girls,” Derick says.

“What is this?” Ruthie asks.

“Effie and Daisy,” Jenny, the girl who’d been carrying the cage, says. “Daisy’s the white one.”

“They’re from Tiffani’s biology class, but she needs us to foster them for awhile,” Derick says.

“They’re very sweet,” Jenny says.

“Yeah,” Mandy, the other girl, echoes.

“Ms. Conners said you can teach them their names and tricks and stuff,” Jenny says.

“Huh,” Ruthie says. “You’re so cheap, sometimes, Derick.”

“They need to be cared for,” he says. “And we need to care. You said.”

Ruthie leans in to examine them. Two noses, one brown and one white, poke out of a plastic igloo in the floor of the cage and, ever so delicately, sniff.

C.L. Bledsoe

Posted over on Troubadour 21

A Romance

A Romance


He called eel grass
what she called seaweed.
He insulated their house with it.
She was interested in
the transparence of her skin.
He walled the bathroom
with barn-siding, he built the couch
with wood he had chopped.
She, a friend once said,
was a calligrapher of the dark.
He dug a root cellar
to store vegetables. He built a shack
for his ducks. Once, while asleep,
he said “the half-shut eye of the moon”.
She spoke about the possible
precision of doubt.
He knew when the wind changed
what weather it would bring.

She baked bread, made jam
from sugar berries, kept a notebook
with what she called
little collections of her breath.
He said the angle the nail goes in
is crucial.
She fed the ducks, called them
her sentient beings.
She wondered how one becomes
a casualty of desire.
He said a tin roof in summer
sends back the sun’s heat.
She made wine from dandelions.
She once wrote in her notebook
“the ordinary loveliness of this world”.
He built a bookcase
for her books.
They took long walks.


Stephen Dunn

Posted over on AGNI Online

The Protean Man

The Protean Man


for Robin Johnstone


Every year a new hat
with a new head in it.
It happens in June,
these ritual murders of himself,
these large, continuous births.
He shows up at our house and says
the man we knew went out of style,
and introduces himself anew.
Each time it gets easier for us;
he’s the new book by an author
we’ve learned to trust: we buy it
because we’re buying him.
This year he says “I’m going to build
houses and pursue the astral”
and we nod, knowing he’s serious.
“Wait”, I say, “til I get the wine
and we can relax and hear about it”.
“I don’t drink wine anymore”, he says.


Stephen Dunn

Posted over on AGNI Online

A Discreet Charm

A Discreet Charm

Our good friends are with us,
Jack and Jen, old lefties with whom
we now and then share
what we don’t call our wealth.
We clink our wine glasses, and I say,
Let’s drink to privilege . . .

the privilege of evenings like this.
All our words have a radical past,
and Jack is famous for wanting the cog
to fit the wheel,
and for the wheel to go straight

down some good-cause road. But he says
No, let’s drink to an evening as solemn
as Eugene Debs demanding fair wages—
his smile the bent arrow only the best men

can point at themselves.
I serve the salad
Barbara has made with pine nuts, fennel,
and fine, stinky cheese.
It’s too beautiful to eat,
Jen says, but means it
only as a compliment.

Over the years she’s eaten the beautiful
and accommodated mixed feelings, walked
through squalor as often
as the rest of us
to reach some golden center of a city.

Here’s to an evening of contradictions,
I say, let’s never live without them.
We’re in northern Appalachia
where strip mining and slag heaps

uglify the nearby mountains, and where
the already poor will lose their jobs
if the ugliness is corrected.
A sign on the interstate says Noah’s Ark

Being Rebuilt Here. Here is where irony
dies its regular public death,
and many believe
they’re telling the truth
by simply saying what they think,

which means here is like most places.
Jack’s about to say something,
but the scallops dappled with sesame seeds
and wrapped in bacon are ready.
They’re especially delicious,

Barbara says, because they’re unnecessary.
Our friends don’t seem to think
that’s funny, but we all dig in
to the unnecessary as if
we can’t get enough of it.
As I was about to say,

Jack says, Ever since Obama, I’m feeling
a widespread sense of decency,
aren’t all of you?
I’d like to agree with him,
but widespread
suddenly makes me think of the night sky

and large, empty spaces.
More like pinpricks of decency,
I want to say, isolated little outposts,
but here comes Barbara with the shameless
store-bought cheesecake
called Strawberry Swirl,

which, for a while, tends
to end all arguments, though there was
a time we’d have renounced it—
back then when evenings like this
were emblems of excess and vapidity
and a life that made us furious.



Stephen Dunn

Posted over on New Ohio Review

Dancing With God

Dancing With God


At first the surprise
of being singled out,
the dance floor crowded
and me not looking my best,
a too-often-worn dress
and the man with me
a budding casualty
of one repetition too much.
God just touched his shoulder
and he left.
Then the confirmation
of an old guess:
God was a wild god,
into the most mindless rock,
but graceful,
looking—this excited me—
like no one I could love,
cruel mouth, eyes evocative
of promises unkept.
I never danced better, freer,
as if dancing were my way
of saying how easily
I could be with him, or apart.
When the music turned slow
God held me close
and I felt for a moment
I'd mistaken him,
that he was Death
and this the famous embrace
before the lights go out.
But God kept holding me
and I him
until the band stopped
and I stood looking at a figure
I wanted to slap
or forgive for something,
I couldn't decide which.
He left then, no thanks,
no sign
that he'd felt anything
more than an earthly moment
with someone who could've been
anyone on earth.
To this day I don't know why
I thought he was God,
though it was clear
there was no going back
to the man who brought me,
nice man
with whom I'd slept
and grown tired,
who danced wrong,
who never again
could do anything right.


Stephen Dunn

Posted over on The Virginia Quarterly Review

You'd Be Right

You'd Be Right


He often needed two women. Just one—
how unfair to expect from her so much!
Intelligence before and after sex,
a certain naughtiness during,
gifts of companionship and solitude.
But he liked the day-to-day of marriage
and its important unimportances,
quiet moments made livable
by the occasional promise of a fiesta.
And though he knew he wasn’t enough
for her either, and always assumed
she had similar thoughts, if not secrets,
nevertheless you may be thinking cad,

maybe even monster,…

…you who’ve been happy,
or differently unhappy,
or obeyed all your life
some good rule. And you’d be right
if you guessed his wife’s eventual coolness,
her turning away, and, when he didn’t leave,
the slow rise of the other woman’s
disappointment, which would turn to anger,
then to sadness.
You’d be right, but can you imagine
what joys accrue to the needy
over a lifetime of seeking love?
Can you say you’re not envious,
or that you’re sure
it wasn’t worth what he risked and lost?


Stephen Dunn

Posted over on The Monserrat Review

Here and There

Here and There

Here and there nightfall
without fanfare
presses down, utterly
expected, not an omen in sight.
Here and there a husband
at the usual time
goes to bed with his wife
and doesn’t dream of other women.
Occasionally a terrible sigh
is heard, the kind that is
theatrical, to be ignored.
Or a car backfires
and reminds us of a car
backfiring, not of a gunshot.
Here and there a man says
what he means and people hear him
and are not confused.
Here and there a missing teenage girl
comes home unscarred.
Sometimes dawn just brings another
day, full of minor
pleasures and small complaints.
And when the newspaper arrives
with the world,
people make kindling of it
and sit together while it burns.


Stephen Dunn

Posted over on In A Dark Time