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published August 2009

Simeon Berry lives in Boston, where he is a poetry and fiction reader for Ploughshares. He has won a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters, the Dana Award for Poetry, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant. Recent work appears in Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, and Colorado Review, and is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, 5 AM, and DIAGRAM.

&4

by

There’s noth­ing for it. Your grand­fa­ther finally passes out in the recliner, star­ing bit­terly into his cataracts. Then your younger brother can del­i­cately change the chan­nel to Barney Miller. Everyone is so drab it’s exciting.

The lull helps when your mother’s boyfriend says the gor­geous tail­fins on your grandfather’s nurse need to be pinned back some­thing awful. You mut­ter, Right. Because that kind of sex­ual con­fi­dence isn’t weird for me at all.

What keeps you awake is the after­thought of organza in your bed from your mother, which is inno­cent but clearly inappropriate.

She blocks the hero­ines with her body when they read stiffly from the scrip­ture of net­work nudity. The only other chan­nel has flushed tel­e­van­ge­lists sweat­ing pixels.

Tomorrow, you tell your­self, you will sort the evi­dence of things seen and unseen.