she scrubs at a dinner plate with a clump of hair and tells her boy she is not balding.  the most harmful part of her satisfactory conclusion is the offhand detail of how her brain no longer needs a straw.  the boy squeezes himself shut.  his father is a phrase he can recount.  in my coffin I am a withered leg.  he envisions a christmas tree no bigger than a toddler’s crutch and a cow nudging a deer awake with its nose.  sleeping deer, I would eat the babies but fear I’ll have nothing to eat.  either god is distant or has an increasing phobia of the next moment.  three people

are one
hearing two

sob.