Poem of the Week, by Bob Hicok
Yesterday I had a hitch installed on the back of my car. The U-Haul installation place was off a busy frontage road, its entrance blocked by men who came running up to my car, masks askew, shouting at me in Spanish, a language I (still) don’t speak, holding up fingers —one? two? and pushing each other: Me! Me! No, me!
Finally I understood. This was a U-Haul place full of moving trucks for rent. They were asking did I need help moving, and how many men did I need? I shook my head, tried to smile, tried to explain I was only there for a hitch, tried again to smile. The look in their eyes told me they didn’t understand, told me they were just this side of desperate, told me they’d do anything for work.
Calling Him Back from Layoff, by Bob Hicok
I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause
during which it would have been
confusing to say hello again so I said
how are you doing and guess what, he said
fine and wondered aloud how I was
and it turns out I’m OK. He
was on the couch watching cars
painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars
painted with ads for Tide around an oval
that’s a metaphor for life because
most of us run out of gas and settle
for getting drunk in the stands
and shouting at someone in a t-shirt
we want kraut on our dog. I said
he could have his job back and during
the pause that followed his whiskers
scrubbed the mouthpiece clean
and his breath passed in and out
in the tidal fashion popular
with mammals until he broke through
with the words how soon thank you
ohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove
through the wires on the backs of ions
as one long word as one hard prayer
of relief meant to be heard
by the sky. When he began to cry I tried
with the shape of my silence to say
I understood but each confession
of fear and poverty was more awkward
than what you learn in the shower.
After he hung up I went outside and sat
with one hand in the bower of the other
and thought if I turn my head to the left
it changes the song of the oriole
and if I give a job to one stomach other
forks are naked and if tonight a steak
sizzles in his kitchen do the seven
other people staring at their phones
hear?
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When my kids were little and nothing else worked I used to resort to the dreaded counting threat. I’m going to count to ten. One. Two. Three. Why this worked I don’t really know, but I never had to count past three. 
On a moonless night a long time ago, just off the highway, I leaned against a cinder block wall with a payphone pressed to my ear. The only light came from passing cars and a bug-stained fluorescent bulb mounted above the phone. The voice on the other end was bored, disinterested. Across the miles I felt the connection diminishing, no, diminished, no, gone. 
Yesterday I sat at the table all day and labored through every paragraph of every page of a forthcoming novel, trying for the many-eth time to get the timeline perfect, and then I got up this morning and did it again. If Micah disappears on Wednesday night and Sesame starts looking for him on Thursday morning and winter break is a week from Friday and the weekends don’t count then how many days will it take for blah blah blah blah blah. Scratch paper and pen to my right, calendar to my left, stuck in the middle with my own inadequacy. 
One of my daughters had a friend when she was little, a friend the rest of us couldn’t see. He had a strange name which we all loved. Sometimes we would check in on him. “He’s asleep,” was the most common answer. Sometimes “He’s visiting his grandma,” or even “He went away.” Once, disturbingly, “he died.”
Hiking the other day up a steep and narrow trail, my eyes kept searching for where I should step next. And then my feet kept setting themselves down exactly where I wanted them to be. I didn’t have to look at them; they knew what to do. But how? How does this body of mine know how to do all the things it just. . . does? Dance and run and knead dough and type and shuffle a deck of cards and tell me when I’m hungry or cold or full or tired? How do all those signals make their magic way from eyes to brain to nerves to muscle and bone? Even though I don’t play basketball I felt my own self moving to every line of this beautiful spin of a poem. My body, all our bodies, are wondrous. 
Before taking the city bus for the first time, I was scared. How much does it cost and what if you don’t have exact change and what are those green cards everyone else seems to be holding and oh crap what about that scanner thingie? Etcetera.
