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LUCK
Each week my Louis puts $10
in the lottery. Ten tickets
to happiness, he says.
He prays we win, I pray
we won't.
Louis is ready for being rich,
with lists of things to do,
and things to buy. But what can it mean,
that new life, but the end of the one
we have now? I've heard of people
betting $50 each week and always losing.
I hope we can be that lucky.
Louis tells God, let me win, please,
I'll be good. He has a hundred tricks
for picking winners, and dreams each night
of numbers. Louis lives for the drawings,
nervous as a first-time father.
I pretend to hope with him. We hold hands
and scream at the bouncing balls.
When we lose, he curses and moans.
Then we make love, tenderly
joined by defeat.
Inside, tension is cutting me up.
I know Louis. He'll want
new clothes and cars, novelty and
change, he'll want other women,
and I'll have new scars.
I worry all week. The odds
are on my side; but bad luck
can happen to anyone.
I pray to God, for my sake, for
the chiIdren—make Louis
like a blind man reading road signs,
let all his numbers be cursed and evil,
and may my Louis be the universe's
most unlucky man.
FIREMAN
"In the back," the mother screamed,
"he's in the back." My husband saved
a baby from a building about to collapse,
flames at all the windows. He crawled
under smoke as thick as walls, furniture
on fire, grabs this child from a crib.
Staggers out coughing, then fainted.
Partial disability from that date on.
His picture was in every paper.
A genuine hero. We need them.
My husband had the look, the
attitude. "It wasn't nothing special,"
he said. But we both knew
he gave five years off his life.
The baby grew up to be no good.
A thief and then a hoodlum.
It's a small town. We know.
The last rumor is that he
killed a man over drugs.
My husband's retired now,
not in good shape. I hear him
coughing, know he has to wonder,
maybe he should have let
the little bastard burn.
CARRIAGE TRADE
This'll surprise you:
never did like horses.
Dumb as big, they are,
watching you with swollen
brown eyes, like they're thinking,
but believe it, they ain't.
Don't like outdoors neither,
not cold rain sneaking
in everywhere, not snow
flicking my face, not those blazing days,
the sun smacking my eyes,
the steam of horseshit
standing up off the street.
Nope, don't like one thing about driving,
not one thing you could see.
But I put in a life,
enjoyed it, too.
What I lived for was being everybody's
high point, the thing they carried away
in their hearts forever.
"We took the carriage
through the park," they'll tell their kids
thirty years later,
I swear to God.
And I loved sitting up there high
and I know all the answers,
like a priest. Know the mysteries
of the universe. People pay me
and I ride them around and tell them
all the secrets they can handle.
Only bad thing I remember
is some horse's ass, he's been before,
maybe lives in the city,
knows everything himself,
talk, talk, talk,
he takes my place.
I sit there wanting
to give him a good kick,
tell him what he should know:
you don't fuck with
a man's living.
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