Somedays

by Billy Collins

Some days I put the people in their places at the table, bend their legs at the knees, if they come with that feature, and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs. All afternoon they face one another, the man in the brown suit, the woman in the blue dress, perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved. But other days, I am the one who is lifted up by the ribs, then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse to sit with the others at the long table. Very funny, but how would you like it if you never knew from one day to the next if you were going to spend it striding around like a vivid god, your shoulders in the clouds, or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper, staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

Dialect of a Skirt

The young girl wanted a new voice. After all, people got new things every day. A new hip, a new nose, a new set of suspenders. She adored the consonants that landed like wooden shoes. She loved the type of L-sounds that made a mouth drool from the back of the tongue to the front. She practiced her new voice into seashells, tin cans, caves. She gave her first performance quietly, into the ear of her sleeping dog. She could tell by his snorting that his dreams were of fat tree trunks and black, truffle-filled soil. Later, she drove to the local gas station and used her new voice to ask for a pack of cigarettes. She wasn't wearing a bra, but the attendant didn't notice. He was too busy listening to the way sound seemed to drip out of her mouth as she said the word, Camel. by Erica Miriam Fabri