INEDIBLE

Julie

I taught a middle-aged Korean
woman. Funny how funny I
feel about taught though I have
no qualms about teaching. She
asked me to call her Julie,

refused to burden me with her
real name though I assured her
Korean names were easy. We
knew each other in Ann Arbor.
I often feel she, more than any

other, gave me that town. Her
husband, a ship builder, was
as unrevealed as her christening.
Sometimes when I got to class
early I would lie on the floor

and picture him cobbling a
primitive ship, like Noah, or
overseeing a team of welders
drawing fierce seams on a sea-
going ambition. Sometimes he,

too, lay on his back, bobbing
on the Main, slowly swelling
to a privateer’s galleon. I was
glad to have the town because
I didn’t know what to do with it.

I was glad, eventually, to be
taught: A name seems easy if
it sits in the mouth like a small
smooth stone. Swallow it, and
know how difficulty burns.

In Our Twenty-Second Year

I notice a predictor for our most auspicious
years: identical even digits. At daybreak’s
cleanest moment we wake and engage in

nods public figures would mistake for silent
prayer. They stray into the same error when
sentences glide like domesticated predators

over, under, around the furniture. “Merck
is forsaking their vaccine.” Mike says, half
to his pillow. “I have more notes for a sotto

voce “Star-Spangled Banner.” “No more
fat-free milk.” When light arrives, he types
up math found in the car, in the bath, in our

dawning bed. I, with an ear trained on similes
that roll and fall from my head, make coffee,
unload the washer, rip a Glad® bag from its

axel, raise it high (like an axe or an enfant)
pull it down with force that, on the third or
fourth try, swells it with a thunderclap of air.

Inedible

The potatoes, while not spring
chickens, were all right when
I assembled the couscous four
days ago. Now they blush black
with bad thoughts: shares to be
sold short, hospital beds to be
short-sheeted, prophets to be

struck short-sighted, the improb-
able circuitry of self-rule to be
short-circuited. With fingertips
like chopsticks I lift out the
tubers, quarantining them at
the foot of the bed. Mike says,
“Throw the hole thing away.

You don’t want to go to the
hospital, especially not these
days.” At last something we
all agree on. Even those who
proclaim themselves immune
see the horrible cornucopias
ERs and ICUs have become.

An Insurance Matter

The cable box digital readout is the
shade of blue Allyson rarely saw in
the dusk. “I will be wed in a dress
made of that,” she would say, her
usual levity abruptly giving way to

gravity. I wake to a 4, a colon, a pair
of 3s. I think: wow, I slept well.
While I slept as poorly as ever, day-
light savings time, quick as a stock
trade, signaled the turn to Spring.

I still battle strangers’ fire ants in
our kitchen nightly. Still write poems
before Mike wakes and denounce
poetry in the afternoon. Poetry and
everything else I do besides waiting

for him. I still rehearse calls to my
parents, determined to hide my new
stammer. Mike and I still discuss
the dusk we’ll wear when marriage
becomes economically attractive.

Joe

Our days packed tight — gin tasting, film festivals,
condo board, neighborhood watch — tight as the
Cafe whose success strangled dance and made
meatpacking feel natural. Our dating, sufficiently short-

lived, was ribbed with un-lubed truths. Maybe,
to this day, Joe thinks of me as a paragon of honesty.
To this day, I wonder if his perfect pitch would
have extended to the tonalities of deception I

eventually would have played. According to a
journal of the time, our least self-conscious outing
was in Golden Gate Park paddling a boat around
Lake Stow, (“It’s like pumping an organ in unison”)

infected with goofiness, perfecting sunburns we
regretted in bed. We passed another boat with a gay
crew. “Ahoy there!” the first mate sang out,
spotting us just before we blurred into a ghost ship.

Timothy Robbins is from a small town in Indiana. He has a B.A. in French, an M.A. in applied linguistics and has been teaching English as a second language since 1991. He has been publishing poetry since 1980 and has six collections of poetry to his name. He met his husband in 1998. They live in Wisconsin.