Harry was looking around the space. It was a room under an eave, and it had a sink on top of a janky-looking cabinet and there was a toilet down the hall, but it was a place where he could supposedly exist in solitude, without Loudermilk and without everything that Loudermilk had begun to stand for in Harry’s mind, which included not just violent early-morning shits, but also a weird kind of authority Harry wasn’t sure, suddenly, looking around, that he so much wanted or even required anymore.

Harry wished he could say something like they did on television, where they shouted, “I’ll take it!” but his stomach froze and he had to wait until the “ladies” had gone back downstairs again and he could follow and then indicate to Loudermilk by means of one of his signature meaningful looks that he was into the proposition.

Loudermilk hammered out the details and they went home to pack Harry up.

Now, in the middle of the day sometimes, the whole house will just be still, and Harry will know that everyone, down to the last sorority sister, is out, and he will descend to the main level and dust and straighten and empty trash cans. He does whatever it seems to him like a good idea to do and then returns to his own quarters. Sorority girls really like sex toys: This is something that he didn’t know before he took this position. Anything even vaguely penis-shaped he finds lying around he’s made it a rule to leave perfectly undisturbed. So far no one’s said boo. An envelope of cash appears under his door every other week.

Harry guesses they must be relatively OK with his job performance, uncertain though he still is of the exact nature of the task.

More important is what is happening to the writing. Sometimes he’ll write a poem that he doesn’t even give to Loudermilk. He’s using a typewriter to make drafts and clean copies. The narrow window over the counter he uses as a desk has a view out onto the blue tops of a pair of pines. Today’s result, a two-fer, is as follows:

Rush Job

I was a member of a firm of twins,

A single box that could be blamed

For rising unilateralism, the crime-

Genius connection, not to mention

Any trail of long ionic air. In truth,

I kind of flunked the interview . . .

A preponderance of green dots here

Indicates the so-called Westerner

Crossing a laconic California coast

At 15,000 MPH, absolutely no re-

Guard for overhangs of debt or

Breaking no news to one’s vendors.

Not the shuttle itself but the sheath.

I guess it comes down to intangibles.

—T. A. LOUDERMILK

We Will Bury You

It was Death, aptly enough, that brought me back to

A distant, looming ceiling red with coffered gold,

Among other environmental bona fides.

I was somebody I wished I’d met,