Hooked and Crooked
Nicole Walker

This is a nice place so I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.
There’s a band of morning glories trailing up the mailbox

post and they invite the man who delivers home with them.
I take them by their purple heads and green them, return

their dead heads to spring. It’s not such a nice place now—
more clinical and stir-uppy. More fluorescent than flour

more causal than casual. As if casual bread would make
me apologize because even the word nice gets all clamped

up in my throat. It’s as if I swallowed the dead and their heads
and did not suffer Olympian for it. It’s as if I exchanged with,

then changed, the job postman. I don’t deliver. I just pick up the checks
that sit whipping in the beyond urban boxes—they wait like tongue

depressors waving: Take me. Cash me. Drink me. Swallow.
Those checks are my ticket out of the sorry that makes this nice

not a place for me but for blued glory, pistil morning. If the bank
could just accept my deposit slip, could credit my account

with the toothsome, wholesome, butter-layered bread I could
eat my apologies. I wouldn’t have to part with them. I wouldn’t

have to look at them. My sorry and I could sit on the front porch
and wait for the mailman and let him bring us ads for Pantene

and Fresca and all the carnival we’ve ever wanted. We could break
bread against the concrete steps. The postman, the flowers and me.

©Nicole Walker