Better homes and gardens for many
but for the rest, we are not so sure.

A bitter pill
doesn’t need
to be swallowed

Again and again
he wrote the
character for his name

When they are there,
I eat pears, says Mrs Last,
who likes pears best

Eventually the
most accident-prone
or war-weary

It was quixotic to think
the cold grey North Atlantic
might be survived in a jam jar boat.

Before they stripped me
they dressed me like a doll
in the sanbenito, a burlap sack

Each twilight we came to another mean village
a little deeper in the forest—
a toothless woman scraping a bloody sheepskin;

The great Evening has fallen and the world has grown tired
like a blinkered dray horse knock-kneed in its harness.
The trees are little green puffs and the flies slower and dimmer—

Black coffee for Amanda,
sipping the white steam—Jessica says
                 we have to