ELOISE SCHULTZ
- Jun 9
- 3 min read
Eloise Schultz lives in downeast Maine. She is the author of [DUG OUT], a hybrid collection forthcoming from Alternating Current Press. She enjoys playing the flugelhorn. Find her online at www.eloiseschultz.com.
HALF A HOLE
Lindsay's garden comes up late this year.
We haul kelp from the Camry and don’t talk
about his daughter’s chemo. My therapist says
grief is a hole in the living room floor. You get
used to avoiding it, but sometimes you forget.
If it takes two men two days to dig a hole, how
long does it take one man to dig half a hole?
Half of the hole is knowing it’s there.
The other half is you still have to live your life.
Lindsay smiles: You can’t dig half a hole.
He tips his pail over the fallow bed.
THUNDEREGG
the summer my dad’s office
moved from Ground Zero
I traded my shiny Pikachu
for Aoi’s polished agate
where an ash-brown sky
hung over a milky sea
a quiet world braced
between explosions
I scootered past
the tattered gaze
of posters
on the Battery
a bolt so fast and
bright nothing
could touch me
GOOD CHEESE
I placed a cheese on the table to soften. “Dogs,” I said, addressing them both. “Let’s get the mail.” The three of us walked across the street. I was in the middle of my container theory in which every space is composed of iterative interiors. I was also thinking about the unwrapped cheese. The last time I ate this cheese was at a party celebrating the long-awaited death of our house rat. Our Dead Rat Party featured a rat playlist, rat paper cutouts, rat-shaped meatloafs, and a rat coloring book; a set of napkins thought destroyed until found rat-stashed under the washstand; foods the rat loved (avocado, peanut butter, cheese doodles); and Leo, our neighbor’s Shiba Inu, who had killed the rat. We ate, we drank, we discussed names for the new puppy, we toasted the rat and its death. All but two guests came. It was a great party! The next afternoon we prepared to eat the leftovers, the last wheel of triple crème from the good cheese aisle. Then the two missing guests knocked on the door. They wore rat costumes and party hats. “Hello!” they said. “Happy Dead Rat Day!” The kettle was already whistling. Already on the table was the good cheese. It would be many years before I enjoyed a good cheese without its premature consumption by a rat or by a person dressed like one, and by then, this would have become a different story. High above the mailboxes, a jet roared and vanished into the distance, headed towards the ocean, towards other continents entirely. I waited a few seconds, and then I walked back inside and placed the unopened mail beside the new good cheese, which was still intact. The puppy knew her name. The dog slept in his chair. I kissed his forehead and left him alone. Everyone talks about how blue the sky was that day.
NEW YORK LULLABY
Whoever heard what happened late
at night, in my parents’ apartment,
when my room was dark but the door
lit up around the edges while a dinner
conversation rumbled on forever, the warm
messy sound of laughter through a wall, the
orange lamplight stretched across the ceiling and
the Carlyle Hotel lit up like a beacon across the Park;
and what ever happened to that kid lying awake listening
to the buses screech to a halt at Lexington Avenue, listening
past the tape player (it had run its course) through static and
the unidentifiable noises she could pick up from the street, an
argument maybe, a dog’s toenails clicking on the sidewalk, the
whir of someone’s wheeled suitcase being pulled across the road;
and where is that special darkness that seemed so safe and small
and curiously sad, the darkness before the lighted door, the faintly
heard “Fuck you!” drifting higher in the air like a released balloon,
beyond the distant buildings, to hang above the city like a sentinel?
FOSSIL TALK
Forget nerves: now’s the time to collect yourself. Harden your outlook. Every committal looks bleak at the onset. What’s a little pressure? A skeleton is no your dead friend. A skeleton is the deadness of your friend + quiet + a good dancer. Didn’t you want a rocklike body? Outlast the dust and you’ll make an impression.