The Knives

by Kristina Faust

On the first warm night we open the windows after dinner and play our dish-songs
and phone-poems and arguments to the street

while the children keep up their games, not minding time or low-cutting
grackles. I don’t resent the birds for instinct

but for always coming back the same. My husband says the same thing every year when
he takes out a stone and oil and works through

the drawer of blades: A sharp knife is a safe knife. Without fail, on the next apple I bleed
because my hands are surprised to find no resistance.

Cut me open and maybe there’s an endocarp still clutching a dark pip or two. I’ve seen miracles,
after all. Once I saw a piano hanging over a street like a whale breaching

over dry land, embarrassed. Two men reached for it while the winch below cried
and cried until the wet-dark body slipped across the sill and

landed with the sound of the whole world in a box. On this first night of open windows,
of shouldering winds and slamming doors, I go to bed a passenger

sailing over subdivided prairie, a town bisected by freights bleating and heavy with
American cupidity, to the cities where all my choices still live.

Published on May 15, 2019