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"Helping My Niece Move in Brooklyn"
by Kevin Grauke
From one tiny room to another across town,
up and down oniony flights of August stairs,
I carry everything she asks me to, doing my best
to be as strong as her directing finger assumes me
to be. I’m good, I swagger when she asks if a break
is something I might need, and I wonder why I pretend.
What harm would a break do me, heaving and wheezing
as I am, despite my best efforts to hide and deceive?
"Selling Mrs G's" by Elizabeth Cox
It’s admirable, how well this home is kept. Yes, you heard, bit of a celebrity. No, I’ve not watched any either, but in the office they say she was a demon with the duster.
You’ll have noticed already with your shoes off, the depth of the carpet here, where your toes in winter will sink into the slate-diamond grey shag and keep you from remembering the rubber-soled slippers kicked deep under the bed on Thursday mornings, when you’ve heard the trundle of rubbish trucks entering the estate crunching on the not-quite-gritted tarmac and so quickly gathered the offending sacks, moving from carpet to doorstep and forcing you to maybe pad upstairs, compost bag still in hand, heavy, sodden with coffee grounds and slimy with the remnants of a bag of bistro salad, getting on your knees to tease the slippers out from under the bed, bag spending too long over that rich fur, moisture gathering at the weight of its bulge, precipitously close to dripping. Or the carpet might have you so fooled that you rush outside in the frost, abandoning all thought of shoes, so nurtured have you been by the carpet, that you slide on the strangely frictionless front garden, being as it is bricked up for extra parking, and the rough soles of your feet are too frictionless, softened by the comfort you’ve moved into.
"The Cat Has a Smoking Problem" by Joshua Jones Lofflin
It’s been obvious for weeks now, the butts piling up beneath the ficus’s leaves or underneath the bed. When I start finding them in the corners of the kitchen, I finally say something to Lauren. She sighs, says she’ll have a word with him. Asks me not to make a big deal over it. Says he only has one or two when he’s stressed.
“He’s a cat,” I say. “What can he possibly be stressed about?”
