Meds Four gray gulls paddle about like ducks, the sky above the bay rapidly changing moods, darkening, then brightening, then darkening again, while I make my own path up the shoreline, careful despite a brain half-paralyzed from new meds to step around the conchs and horseshoe crabs stranded at low tide, too many for saving, a massacre, the water rushing away over the pebbly sand whispering to me, as though in consolation, shush, shush, shush. Interview Questions for a Job Yet to Be Invented Have you ever demanded, received, or paid a ransom? Seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe? Spent a night in the gorilla cage? Bought a human skull on Etsy? Shared an elevator with the eighteen smallest dwarfs in the city? Laughed so hard you dislocated your jaw? Asked Alexa the actual color of the Red Sea? (Intense turquoise.) Been bound and gagged and stuffed in a wheelie bin? Visited a parent in prison? Shrieked like a peacock or impersonated a disreputable poet with a pointy beard and long
CONNOQUENESSING CREEK Two days after my father died, somewhere in Center Township, we pulled off the interstate to get closer to the waterway whose name for years I held between my teeth like a wrist, like a prayer. Connoquenessing means for a long way straight . The creek twists and curls and crawls from the Beaver River through the Oneida Valley Reservoir then back to the Beaver River some fifty-seven miles later. Train tracks hemmed the creek where we stood, a nest of rusted railroad spikes at our feet. Connoquenessing means for a long way straight. The current flowed without shame. Cars passed over the nearby bridge. The late afternoon light hung hazy and thick, a chiffon shroud. I bent down to touch the water as one always must. The shock of the cold didn’t shock me so much. In the water I felt nothing. I stepped back defeated. Connoquenessing means for a long way straight . How often does meeting our hero disappoint us? It was too late to keep the creek a dre