Slices, by Pravasan Pillay

It's 11.30 a.m. The beginning of autumn. I have been writing for three hours, and it's time for lunch – or, perhaps, a late breakfast depending on how you see it. Lunch today will be a cheese sandwich. This is always my lunch when I'm at home writing, so not much decision-making has happened here.

I remove my headphones, close my notebook and laptop, get up from my desk, and walk the few steps to the kitchen. I take three slices from the sandwich loaf we have on hand, and place them flat on the breadboard – which in Swedish homes often pull out from the kitchen counter.

I grab margarine and cheese – this time it's a widely-available variety called prästost (priest cheese) – from the fridge, and place them on the countertop. I reach over to the drying rack and fish out the cheese slicer and a butter knife from amongst the flatware.
 
I use the butter knife and slicer every day so they never actually reside in any particular kitchen drawer. The rack is their home.

Next, I open the margarine tub and, using the knife, scrape generous curls, which I spread  – to all corners – of the bread slices. With the cheese slicer I plane long, evenly thick pieces from the cheese wedge.
 
It is important for the surface of the cheese wedge to remain level throughout this slicing, and subsequent slicings. In Sweden, a person who slices unevenly from a cheese wedge is looked down upon. The wedge this person has cut from is disparagingly called a “skidbacke” – because it resembles a ski slope.
 
Once the cheese slices have been successfully Tetrised on the bread, I horizontally cut the sandwich. I only cut sandwiches diagonally on special occasions; if I'm requested to; or if the contents of the sandwich warrant it.
 
I return the cheese and margarine to the fridge. I place the sandwiches on a saucer and walk to our sofa, where I read an article on my phone, which I saved from yesterday. It takes me eight minutes to eat my sandwiches, after which I head back to the kitchen, drink a glass of water, and wash the dishes.
 
Lastly, I use the palm of my hand to sweep the breadboard clean of crumbs, deposit them in the garbage can, before pushing the board back into the counter. I then walk to my desk, put my headphones on, open my notebook and laptop, and start writing again.

Two Poems by John Grey

SUSPICIOUS DEATH

 

Under gray sky,

the body idles,

until found by a passerby,

until the cops, the ambulance,

arrive.

 

The morning

trudges slowly through clouds

nine-tenths of its light unseen,

while the dead man

never did leave night behind.

 

Crows are first on the scene,

start the conversation

with a series of hacking caws.

 

The corpse’s reply

says nothing of who it was,

only where it can be found.

 

 

BEING SOULLESS

 

I’m just bones sometimes,

pointed or straightened,

supporting one another

like knee to chin,

or grinding when they infringe

on foreign territory.

I’m a rib cage,

and wrists and ankles.

And a skull that my spine

does its best to keep vertical.

 

What else do you wish to know?

The soul? Open the page of

your anatomy book. 

Show me where to look.

Oh I’m a pound of flesh I grant you.

Around the waist especially.

And I’m this wrap of facile skin,

soft and pliable, liable to sever

when a sharp object is applied.

 

Apparently, you want me to be more

than just this skeleton with stuff applied.

But you’ve caught me at the wrong moment.

This is my men’s store dummy phase.

I’m hanging out, just being my body:

intestines, liver, kidney, even heart,

but the one that pumps out blood

not poetry.

 

Show me that book of yours again.

Go to the section on diseases,

the one on injuries.

That’s what I risk by being who I am.

But they’re the only risks.

I think you’ll find

there’s no mention of you in there.

 

Three Poems by John Popielaski

Free Association

 

            When my father came home

            from his father’s funeral,

            he said we might be Russian,

            Jewish even. He said other things,

            like how his father looked

            better than he had in fifteen years.

            I still don’t know if that was humor

            in the process of transmuting grief.

            My mother didn’t want me

            seeing death at that age.

            I was eleven, old enough

            to say goodbye, to wrestle

            with the undefeated. What she was

            thinking I can’t say, but even now

            I rarely go to funerals. I’m smiling

            now because I’m thinking, probably

            because of what my father said

            in line four, of the palest person

            I have ever known. Michael Rosen,

            known as Spider, shielded

            by the highest-number sunscreen,

            was the first to take a Playboy

            from his father’s bureau

            and reveal it to us in the daylight

            with a play-by-play narration

            of its glossy contents.

            He and I were sitting at a table

            in a tony place in Georgetown,

            overlooking the Potomac River

            on a June night in the Clinton years.

            Spider was more confident

            and buzzed than I had ever seen him,

            and he leaned back in his chair

            and said with borrowed smoothness,

            “Hey, now,” each time someone lovely passed.

            It is the world’s way sometimes

            not to recognize an inborn gentleness

            as the default. So I explained

            that people didn’t know him

            well enough to laugh. They didn’t know

            the number sunscreen he depended on,

            his inability to tie a tie.

            I don’t remember when I saw him last,

            but I remember in that era he was dating

            someone domineering from Iran

            and I was working for a man named Lovejoy,

caring for a pair of Shelties

            named for isles in the Hebrides.

 

  

Strange

 

            The other day I did a thing I’m certain

            that my father never thought to do.

            I spent a quarter of my paycheck

            on an oil painting by a friend

            I haven’t seen in more than twenty years.

            It’s sixteen by twenty inches,

            and I wonder where I got the gene

            that has no problem with me staring

            at the space I have allotted for the painting

on the wall between the living room and kitchen.

            Like my father, I had not considered

            how much time is necessary

            for such art to fully dry.

            So I’ll be driving to my friend’s house

            near the Hudson River at the end

            of May to claim the painting,

            which is called Strange House,

            and do a little hiking in the Catskills,

            which I’m certain is another thing

            my father never thought to do.

            As you can probably tell, I’m trying,

            since it’s been so long,

            to hold more tightly to my father,

            to remember similarities

            and differences as clearly as I can.

            When times were tight,

            I went with my father to his night job

            cleaning banks. We vacuumed,

            dumped the trash cans, stood beside

            each other polishing the vault door,

            strangers somehow but beloved.

 

  

Idyll

 

            In 1976, a sparkler flaring

            in each hand in celebration

            of the Fourth, I couldn’t have

            imagined that Estonia

            or any other country in the world

            could be more free than what the song

            has always said quite clearly

            is the land, no irony,

            no winking, of the free.

 

            But there it is.

 

            The Human Freedom Index doesn’t lie.

            I’ve checked it fifty times, and each time

            Latvia is still four places higher

            than America, which I was taught

            was basically a synonym

            for freedom. We are tied

            for seventeenth with Lithuania

            and the United Kingdom. Countries

            I had no idea were countries,

            no offense to Cabo Verde,

            are as close to us in terms of being

            free as we are to New Zealand,

            poised at number two, this close

            to Switzerland, the leader

            of the free world, which I can’t help

            feeling should be our position, #1,

            the perch and title we would have

            to jump the likes of Luxembourg

            and Denmark to reclaim.

 

            If you had told me all this

            on the Bicentennial, I would have twirled

            my sparklers in your eyes

            and found my father by the orb grill

            or my grandpa who had ties to World War II

            and asked if it could ever be true

            that a country that has never been

            the setting of a Western

            or the home of Abner Doubleday

            could ever be more free than we are.

 

            We’d listen to the sizzle

            of the flesh whose plight was not on us

            and to the independent fireworks

            on other blocks, in other yards,

            to ice cubes and the opening

            and closing of the Coleman,

            to unbridled laughter and to talk

            of mostly nothing, to mature

            forsythia adjusting to the breeze,

            and we’d know that no other country

            in the world was waiting as we were

            for nightfall and the big show to begin.