annual summer fiction double issue || machines were keeping her alive
TRANSCRIPT
University of Northern Iowa
Machines Were Keeping Her AliveAuthor(s): JEREMIAH WEBSTERSource: The North American Review, Vol. 294, No. 3/4, Annual Summer Fiction Double Issue(MAY–AUGUST 2009), p. 17Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20697783 .
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A R
We work alone in the silver light of walk-in freezers,
soft brown cardboard shells furred with ice stacked before us.
Our cold faces, russet and trout white, lift as a blushed pink sky
widens over empty streets. In Kazakhstan, the motherland
of wild apples, old orchards are grief hostels in a sea of spent oil.
I confuse my own youth with the world's. A voice without shade,
unmoored, decaying slower than frozen rail ties, but faster
than plastic, youth is like the Dow Jones, thousands of investors
making a million decisions, a random
average, a false light?
our neon blue signs thawing frost. I lean on brick walls,
prepared to quit, taking my time as a doe at the crest of a steep
blind curve browses sidewalk weeds, snow
deleting her prints.
ANGELA ARMSTRONG
Once in the Mojave Desert
One night, years before I was born, my father shivered by the highway with a pistol in his coat pocket. If the next car did not stop, he would shoot a back tire and pray the driver had a spare.
I don't have many pictures. In the one I love most, he's a vapor rising from an asphalt mirage,
water shooting from his hip at a mountain of burning tires. To this day, I still see myself
in the window of every fire truck. I'm the child with the long dark braids I've always wanted to kiss him for,
tiny fingers cupped together, waving from a world so high, it could only be reached if he lifted me into it.
JEREMIAH WEBSTER
Machines Were
Keeping Her Alive
and I began to think that death by bear was better than death by shotgun, death from needle mishap, death from toaster, transistor.
There is the awe
of invention, Look at this
look, she said, and the microwave oven was born.
There is the second opinion pill given by a surgeon with sterile gloves. Machines were keeping her alive. What grace to have been born before respirators and die, the last breath your own.
May-August 2009 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW 17
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