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Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson

Eight Ball

It was fifty cents a game
            beneath exhausted ceiling fans,
the smoke’s old spiral. Hooded lights
            burned distant, dull. I was tired, but you
insisted on one more, so I chalked
            the cue—the bored blue—broke, scratched.
It was always possible
            for you to run the table, leave me
nothing. But I recall the easy
            shot you missed, and then the way
we both studied, circling—keeping
            what you had left me between us.

#AmericanWriters

Autres oeuvres par Claudia Emerson...
Great Depression Story

Sometimes the season changed in th… sometimes the state, but it was al… the Depression, and he was alone i… the train stalled beneath a sky wi… than any he’d seen so far, the fie…
After the Affair

There was no one to tell, so it se… in the lines of the house, in door… In the late afternoons that follow… what could have been someone knock… beat its body against the living r…
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The Bat

We didn’t know what woke us—just s… moving, lighter than our breathing… bound by an icy ligature, our hous… was to the bat a hollow, warmer ca… that now it could not leave. I scr…
The Physical Plant as Prologue

Everything here measures: weight,… and everything costs in this seclu… of daughters, the place an ark—its… all of a kind in an archaic, combe… order: straightened teeth, trained…
Frame: an Epistle

Most of the things you made for me… chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker… away to friends who could use them… be reminded of the hours lost ther… not having been witness to those d…
Stable

One rusty horseshoe hangs on a nai… above the door, still losing its l… and a work-collar swings, an empty old noose. The silence waits, wild… broken by hoofbeat and heavy
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Daybook

This is the season of her dying, a… have kept it, I find, underneath t… in a box filled with photographs—h… of that last year, the calendar a… she did not intend to write. In th…
Breaking Up the House

Every time I go back home, my mot… tells me I should begin to think n… I refuse, as though somehow this i… already done a harder thing than I… have to do. She was only eighteen…
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Buying the Painted Turtle

Two boys, not quite men, pretended to let it go only to catch it again and again. And the turtle, equally determined, each time gave its heart to escape them. We were near the base of t...
The Mannequin above Main Street Motors

When the only ladies’ dress shop c… she was left on the street for tra… one arm missing, lost at the shoul… at the hip. But she was wearing a… and blonde wig, so they helped the…
Piano Fire

How she must have dreaded us and o… than we hated practice, the lesson… her arthritic hands, the metronome… to us about the history of the pia… spinet and player had come across…
Surface Hunting

You always washed artifacts at the kitchen sink, your back to the room, to me, to the mud you’d tracked in from whatever neighbor’s field had just been plo…
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The Polio Vaccine, Chatham, Virginia, 1964

It was not death we came to fear b… her other birth, waking remade fro… of that disease. One leg was withe… numb weight behind her, one should… a camel’s—and what did we know of…
Aftermath

I think by now it is time for the… I imagine the field, the one above… house we rented, has lain in conva… long enough. The hawk has taken ba… above new grass, and the doe again…
Bone

It was first dark when the plow tu… Unsown, it came fleshless, mud-rud… but itself, the tendon’s bored eye… a ponderous needle. And yet the po… of one end dared what was undone



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