Ed McManis
Looking For My Gardening Shovel
My wife believes
rabbits
love petunias
even
the white ones.
On a weekend
during pre-season
I rigged a four foot
wooden fence topped
with chicken wire.
We woke one
August morning
all but a half-dozen
petunias beheaded
stems sadly swaying.
My wife replanted
the survivors in
a hanging pot
that spins and dangles
above our bed.
Before she falls
asleep she prays:
Rabbits, flowers,
eternity. I open
the bedroom window
for the hawks.
A Buncha’ Fuggin’ English Majors
No one could agree on the setting, the year,
or even the century, so by noon we agreed
to call it an auditorium, broken into groups
to tackle plot, character, conflict, arc of change,
but theme was the stickler, the artistic hill upon
which to die. The younger ones, of course, kept
looking for the green flow of the EXIT which
led to the Ph.D. track; I pointed south, figured
we’d be an hour gone to dinner before they
realized it was a red herring; your hero never
really changes. My partner, half my age,
had smooth hands, a mini iPad, three
different colored pads of Post-its. She smelled
like lavender, Dickinson and graded papers, and I
felt myself falling, the desire to write some bad
Petrarchan verse. Speaking of…someone took a poll,
re-organized the groups by genres: mystery, romance,
confessional, until an old buzzard who’d written a bestseller
about suicide and bowling, pre-computers, rose like
Moses, proclaimed, in a Mailer voice, “Just fiction
or non-fiction. Jesus Fuggin’ Christ.” And within two
minutes, the genre group attacked him like red ants
on a plump wasp, stripped him to his tighty-whities,
tried to rig a gallows on the stage, but they were a
Buncha’ Fuckin English Majors
and no one had a hammer or the wherewithal to fashion
a cross or tie a knot, thouogh a second year did recite a death
scene from Shakespeare and in the end, they checked their footnotes,
made him editor, ate green apples from their bagged lunches,
decided the monster from within would be named something
cooler and more hip than Grendel.
Ed McManis is a writer, editor, & erstwhile Head of School. His work has appeared in more than 60 publications, including The Blue Road Reader, California Quarterly, Nimrod, Narrative, Lascaux Review, etc. He, along with his wife, Linda, have published esteemed author Joanne Greenberg’s (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) novel, Jubilee Year.
