Whatever it is Julia Child said about the plate

and the shoulder and shrinking the strike zone

put us in a lot of Queen Anne’s lace

and hub caps. Summer ended with a splinter

in the calendar that dreamed equinox,

time in bisected sheets clipped to the clothesline

and other mid-century and late-century foregrounds:

a bowl of soaking beets bruising the water,

a child reaching into a chest and extracting the head

of a doll. In the field we found the dream

of the small Italian car: to be smaller

and more Italian, to drag cans around

the cul de sac. I bought a gun. I bought

a gun but it was a toy and it came with instructions.

 

*

 

Dan Kaplan is the author of Bill’s Formal Complaint (The National Poetry Review Press) and the bilingual chapbook SKIN (Red Hydra Press). His work appears in VOLT, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Washington Square, and elsewhere. He is managing editor and poetry co-editor of Burnside Review and Burnside Review Press.