Excerpt from “Two Bodies Breathing”

by Lois Williams

Over bagels and decaf at Brown Bag Deli, Myra wants to know what brought me to America. She pauses her coffee stirrer, looks me square on, and tells me she can’t imagine leaving England, leaving family, to live in Pittsburgh: “You married, kid?” Twelve days on the job, I don’t know Myra well enough to talk freely about myself. We track sales contracts for a lab equipment manufacturer: beakers, hotplates, unbreakable thermometers. I’m much better talking shop. This month’s top seller is a sturdy micro-centrifuge, great for spinning blood into its raw constituents. I want to say I’m learning how to be unmarried, how to live alone in America. Secretly, I think the heart is a centrifuge flinging out whatever cannot settle in its muscle. I nick the lip of my Styrofoam cup. “We’re separated,” I say. I feel as if I’ve lied.

Calling Out the Days

This morning the moon’s still there
when I shift the drapes to see if we’re

having rain or sun or more of that gray
indeterminate Pittsburgh weather that looks

cold but isn’t and I think of Stephen
and his love of the 5-day forecast

and how when I first came to America
I learned the shapes of the states that way:

all those animated clouds scudding over Illinois
crossing Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania

the way I’ve known women at work
to drive weekends across state lines to buy

lottery tickets, and he’d be calling out the days
sunny Tuesday Wednesday thunderstorms

and 85 on Friday, and how a week of sun
looked like a jackpot on the one-armed bandit,

like putting in a quarter and walking off with
summer in your pocket, and I see now

there’s some joy in prediction that I don’t understand,
some energy that comes from thinking you know

what’s coming up, which is maybe why I can’t go
happily to church (although I’ll still say the prayers)

or why my friend whose protease inhibitor might quit
insists on telling me it’s the idea of illness he’s afraid of,

not the living in his body. Breathe all you can, he tells me.
Don’t worry so much. Last week I drove to Minneapolis

where skywalks warm pedestrians for miles in circulated air
and saw the cornfields weathers move across

before they settle Pittsburgh, and how the shadow
the car makes at seventy-five is the same shadow

it makes at thirty and what does it matter
if on the way up I stopped

at the South Bend Howard Johnson’s
and on the way back at the Rockford Super8?

The rooms were the same room decorated differently.
Eventually I slept and when I got back in the car

at 6 a.m., there was the moon a bit thinner than before
but the moon all the same and worth looking up for.

—Lois Williams