S h e r r y  O ' K e e f e 

Bus 16

People who start fires aren’t the ones to put them out. Our father taught us burning trash was illegal, but a gully-load of tires had been lit. When no one cares to stop it, heat can flame for years in the chambers underground. Through the smoke of burning rubber, we rode a school bus along the Missouri River shore, past the county dump to our squatty white house in the down-spray of the falls. Two bedrooms for eight of us, with the baby’s crib in the hall. The older boys had a bedroom town kids called a porch. These kids in town were lucky, we thought, to ride bikes to corner candy stores. Quarters in their pockets. Smooth pavement for the games they played while the five of us spent hours on the country bus with thirty-three Hill 57 Indians. We stood out with our Irish freckles and front porch house against their darker skin and homes built from scraps mined from the coulees around the dump. We learned who could be friends, who would never be. Mary Little Cross lived in a shack with a two inch gap around the front door. Dark winter mornings kerosene light leaked out. She stayed warm by wearing her three dresses while she slept. She told me she switched them so it seemed as though she changed her clothes. We’d smooth our skirts and huddle in the fourth row of our bus. Knees pressed together, the paper keyboard we had made spread across our laps. I showed her how to read music from a book I brought from home. Mary taught me how to chant for rain.

You Are Here

Rhoda—he calls her Rhoda 

because he doesn’t know her 

name—begs for money between 

where he sleeps and where 

he buys his beer. She’s on 

the corner of Fifth and Friday 

every day but he doesn’t usually 

see her. When he gave her 

a five dollar bill her hand 

touched his. 

That was yesterday. 

Caught in his own trauma, 

he’s still feeling the magnitude of her 

when he calls to tell me about the touch. I listen 

while I scramble eggs. What does it mean 

and did you notice—he asks 

and I don't answer— everyone is caught up

in finding their own Einstein.

My mouth is full. We don’t learn 

from what is here.I am eating breakfast.

Skim

She told me how she’d been born to live 

fifty-three Octobers—not one November more. She scattered

her way through our town like a Great Dane pup 

chasing crinkled leaves, unaffected 

by the scent of baring trees. Wanting her ease, 

some would mimic her, mirror the prisms 

in her laugh. Once, by chance, she shared with me 

her bench in Terry Park, moving aside

her cardboard bundle. She counted 

maple shadows, offered to reveal how 

she kept the possibility of fifty-four years

deep in her poker pocket, an ace hidden in her 

greened satchel. I thought to see the usual

when she undid its clasp: twigs and twine, 

Aunt Jemima syrup bottles, tins of mustard seed. 

She parted the forest of brown velvet 

lining the tin bottom. I leaned forward to peer in—

it opened on blue water.

Sherry O’Keefe is the author of several books and her poetry can be read in many places. Too Much August is a good place to find her whenever she’s out of town.