It starts out dream-like, setting up the card tables
as the sun burns the sidewalks dry, as summer comes
to March, the cherry blossoms turning rows of trees
into photo negatives up and down the block and
snowing their petals down. We have a corner lot;
good foot traffic for this neighborhood, which today
is full of stunned people in green. They’re not drunk
yet but the weather is drawing them out onto the street
to take short steps. Only the dogs pull them along.
We sell books, an end table, two vases. We stay out
through lunch and the afternoon’s angling sun,
our tables increasingly covered with things like
your white plastic letter opener, my tasseled bookmarks.
Our child has put out a drummer smurf missing an arm.
That’s what’s left to us by evening, but we stay out there,
and the people walking by now are all emerald and
certainly drunk, and we sell a mug with no handle,
a stapler shaped like a frog. The sun sets finally
and the newborn mosquitos start to test the air.
There’s the music from student houses, which
we didn’t know were in the neighborhood. Not
Irish music, just music. We recollect our remaining
peculiarities and break down the tables, put them all
in the same place inside.
DAVID EBENBACH is the author of Autogeography, a chapbook of poetry (Finishing Line Press); two collections of short stories—Between Camelots (University of Pittsburgh Press), which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the GLCA New Writer’s Award; and Into the Wilderness (Washington Writers’ Publishing House), which won the WWPH Fiction Prize—as well as The Artist’s Torah (Cascade Books), a nonfiction guide to the creative process. Ebenbach has a PhD in psychology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He teaches creative writing at Georgetown University.
