Fuel Read Free Page B

Floors of Bargains *** Step Right In !
    stared glumly at a large clock.
    December was just beginning.
    One touched up her lipstick.
    She could see herself between the 6 and 7.
    Sunday-school children ate cookies
    shaped like trees.
    A waiter draped garlands of crumpled greenery
    above the door of his restaurant,
    adjusting the velvet bow.
    A toothless woman wearing plastic bags
    asked for the hour, which I gave her
    too enthusiastically.

    Here they came again.
    Rolls of wrapping paper.
    Red letters of ads.
    I wasn’t hungry
    for the countdown.
    Cluttered days
    so sharp they cut.
    What about our people
    on the giant list of loves?
    What would we give them
    this time around?
    The days say we will
    look and look and look.
    I plunged my foot
    into the river of gloom,
    it said it did not need me.

PANCAKES WITH SANTA

    Santa has a bad memory.

    Santa forgets your name
    the minute he talks
    to the next person.

    Santa calls you by a baby’s name
    and doesn’t even know.
    Ho! Ho! Ho!
    Should you tell Santa?
    Already he thought you were a girl
    though you just had a haircut
    last week.
    How can he remember
    all those wishes?
    How will Santa ever find
    our house?

    The world has turned to
    red sweaters, jingles,
    freezing rain.

    Santa says he’s on a diet,
    that’s why he’s not eating pancakes
    with the rest of us.
    Mrs. Claus told him to
    lose some weight.

    Santa keeps drifting back
    for more chatting.
    He sits down at our table.

    What else can we say to Santa?
    Santa says
ain’t
.

ALASKA

    The phone rang in the middle of the Fairbanks night and was always a wrong number for the Klondike Lounge.
Not here
, I’d say sleepily.
Different place. We’re a bunch of people rolled up in quilts
. Then I’d lie awake wondering, But how is it over there at the Klondike? The stocky building nestled between parking lots a few blocks from our apartment like some Yukon explorer’s good dream of smoky windows and chow. Surely the comforting click of pool balls, the scent of old grease, flannel, and steam. Back home in Texas we got wrong numbers for the local cable TV company. People were convinced I was a secretary who didn’t want to talk to them. They’d call four times in a row.
Sir
, I eventually told a determined gentleman,
We’ve been monitoring your viewing and are sorry to report you watch entirely too much television. You are currently ineligible for cable services. Try reading a book or something
. He didn’t call back. For the Klondike Lounge I finally mumbled,
Come on over, the beer is on us
.

SO THERE

    Because I would not let one four-year-old son
    eat frosted mini-wheat cereal
    fifteen minutes before dinner
    he wrote a giant note
    and held it up
    while I talked on the phone

    LOVE HAS FAILED

    then he wrote the word LOVE
    on a paper
    stapled it twenty times
    and said

    I STAPLE YOU OUT

    *

    memory stitching
    its gauze shroud
    to fit any face

    he will say to his friends
    she was mean
    he will have little interest
    in diagramming sentences
    the boy / has good taste
    enormous capacities
    for high-tech language
    but will struggle
    to bring his lunchbox home

    I remember / you
    you’re / the one
    I stared at in the / cloud
    when I wasn’t paying / attention
    to people / on the ground

    *

    the three-year-old wore twenty dresses
    to her preschool interview

    her mother could not make her
    change

    take some off her mother pleaded
    and the girl put on a second pair of tights

    please I’m begging you
    what will they think of us

    the girl put all eight of her pastel barrettes
    into her hair at once

    she put on
    her fuzzy green gloves

    she would have worn four shoes but could not
    get the second pair on top of the first pair

    her mother cried you look like a mountain
    who has come to live with me

    she had trouble walking
    from the car up to the school

    trouble sitting
    in the small chair that was offered

    the headmistress said
    my my    we are a