Excerpts from the work of J. Allyn Rosser and Dan Chaon

Jill Allyn Rosser

Lover Release Agreement

Against his lip, whose service has been tendered?

lavishly to me, I hold no lien.

Here’s his heart, which finally has blundered

from my custody. Here’s his spleen.

Hereafter let your hair and eyes and breasts

be venue for his daydreams and his nights.

Here are smart things I’ve said, and all the rest

you’ll hear about. Here are all our fights.

Now, whereas I waive rights to his kiss,

The bed you’ve shared with him has rendered null

his privilege in mine. Know that, and this:

undying love was paid to me in full.

No matter how your pleasures with him shine,

you’ll always be comparing them to mine.

 

Dan Chaon

From “Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow”

The baby dies and there is a little funeral. OK, try and insert yourself into that moment. Stay calm, stay cool, stay sane. No one else is crying. Everyone probably thinks it is for the best. After the tortuous debates – abortion or no abortion, adoption or no adoption, marriage or no marriage – now suddenly everything can go back to the way it was. Meg is an ex-mother and you are an ex-father and she can go to college like she’d planned before she got pregnant and you can do whatever it is that you’re going to do. That’s right.

Through your sunglasses, you can look at Meg privately; you can observe the solemn congregation, your basketball buddies with their hands folded in front of their groins like they’re posing for a team photo, your mom with her jaw set, some of meg’s relations. It’s hard not to imagine a guilty sense of relief rippling across all their faces. You can see it as they bow their heads, and you clasp your hands in front of you:”Of dust thou art,’ the preachers intones, and Meg looks at you for a second, the kind of glazed look of someone who has just been started away, and then your brother, Dooley, who is all bloodshot and damp-faced, stares at you with his mouth quivering. You turn your head away and there are the waves of July heat flickering like holograms over the alfalfa fields beyond the cemetery….”