Suicide Lane by Mather Schneider

Yesterday I was walking down the sidewalk
and at the corner of Dodge and Grant
there was this young blind girl,
one arm full of books,
the other holding the leash
of a seeing-eye dog.
They were walking slowly toward me.
Grant road was busy as hell
stinking and crying with rush hour.
The horns blared in the no-man’s land
of the only suicide-lane left in the city.
The seeing-eye dog didn’t know
what the hell was going on,
it must have been his first day on the job
because he was darting all over the
place, and the girl kept yanking
the leash and cursing.
When we came closer to each other
the dog veered at me
across her path
with his tongue hanging out and a big dumb
smile on his face.
“God DAMMIT!” the girl cursed,
“HEEL! ”
The dog didn’t seem to mind
being choked back
because in the next instant he was focused
on the redolent and wild joy
of a hamburger napkin
blowing feral in the cars’ crosswinds.


Mather Schneider, Arizona, USA

Newly Weds at the Grocery Store by Mather Schneider

He can’t believe she doesn’t like radishes.
He loves them,
they make you burp.
His father loved them too.
“I love my burpers,”
his father used to say.

She is perturbed about the burpers.
They remind her of her aunt Penelope.
To her they are just depraved little apples
that make you cry.
She ripely repudiates their presence.

Is the problem of the burpers
ungovernable?
The decibels by the vegetable bin
impel us to hyperbole.

We’d hate to see them go their separate ways
over a spat in produce—
he soap-boxing the burper,
she purpling
in apoplectic loathing of it.

Whatever happens I hope they remember:
culpability
does not bed with the burper.

The burper is just a tiny tuber.




Mather Schneider, Arizona, USA

Fragile by Mather Schneider

The woman takes down the pictures of her family
and tucks them in a box.
They all look shocked
staring through their little windows
stiff as the sweater people
in the Sears newspaper insert
lining the bottom.

She crumples up
the headlines, stuffs them between
their sharp-elbowed frames
and wraps the whole thing
thoroughly as a headwound.

She tries to protect them
with the magic wand
of her black marker
but she knows too well the way

things shift, and crack;
and the way water always seeps in
like amnesia.


Mather Schneider, Arizona, USA

Family Tree by Mather Schneider

Me and Josie go to Agua Caliente park
and look at a giant mesquite tree
four times bigger than I’ve ever seen
sprawling with great old growth grotesquely gothic arms
spidering out like a nightmare.
It’s so big it would have died long ago
fallen from its own weight
and rotted into the ground
if people hadn’t built a support system
of ropes and chains and rubber hoses and hammocks
and crutches to hold up the biggest
most cumbersome branches.
There’s something obscene about it,
like a man grown so fat
he can’t get out of bed.
Josie tries to imagine something like this happening
in Mexico where she was born.
The American fondness for animals and trees
is a strange sentimental concept to her.
And I think, Why this tree
when so many thousands of other old growth mesquites
were slaughtered seventy five years ago
so people could move in and eventually
yearn for the past?
Me and Josie both wonder if it wouldn’t be better
to let it die
but we are not sure,
and so we just stand there looking at it
eating bananas.


Mather Schneider, Arizona, USA