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Erin Belieu On Being Fired Again I’ve known the pleasures of being fired at least eleven times— most notably by Larry who found my snood unsuitable, another time by Jack, whom I was sleeping with. Poor attitude, tardiness, a contagious lack of team spirit; I have been unmotivated squirting perfume onto little cards, while stocking salad bars, when stripping covers from romance novels, their heroines slaving on the chain gang of obsessive love— and always the same hard candy of shame dissolving in my throat; handing in my apron, returning the cash- register key. And yet, how fine it feels, the perversity of freedom which never signs a rent check or explains anything to one’s family. I’ve arrived again, taking one more last walk through another door, thinking “I am what is wrong with America,“” while outside in the emptied, post-rushhour street, the sun slouches in a tulip tree and the sound of a neighborhood pool floats up on the heat. Plainsong He lived in a sod house, a formal nest of grass that wove green thread around his soul, a bed of mud and cellulose. And she was small. She never grew; the empty wind that blew and reared had bent her to the plains she cared so little for. But he, he didn’t seem to mind her size, he’d found a shape to love there; and she was spare where he was generous as sand, the kind of man who drifted like the yellow hills that lifted their sloping shoulders to the bad lands. For her his mud heart tumbled like the tufted weeds that wheel along the plains, that sea of mammoth bones, that state all made of sky— they married in July. Her thin bouquet of corn flowers remains the brightest thing he’d ever see. I have her ring now, a silver band so little it won’t budge over the knuckle on my pinky. How long ago, a man gave his grass soul to her in her brown dress— and she was always stern, too small, and learned to keep inside a sod house. Brown Recluse Spirit of the ratio one above and one below, she takes figures in a script that haunts the cryptic willow. Spoken in the dialect known to every architect, her cathedrals made of string hold the stirring circumspect. The web, a clock stitched from will, chronologs which hours to kill; when she rests, it’s just a clause in her gauzy codicil. And when readying her bed, she feels a pulse down the thread current through the leaving weave, she pins her sleeve to the dead.