A Monday Poem by Sheryl Noethe: "Winter, Minneapolis, 1988"

The night the brakes went out
we had to veer into the side of a church
to stop. There is a dent in Simpson Methodist.
The parish came running out to see if God
was knocking, and kindly pushed the car
back onto the street.

I got out and walked back
to my apartment in the snow.
The kind that melts just after it lands.
Followed by another. And another.

My hair looked like I'd been swimming.
I sat down and opened a book. He'd nearly
killed us both in that beater car.

Soon I would hear him trudge unhappily
up the steps, damp and broke and out of cigarettes,
wearing the look of a boy who has become a man
by accident.
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Sheryl Noethe lives in Missoula and is the director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative. She has been awarded The McKnight Prize for Literature, a National Endowment for the Arts in Literature, A Montana State Arts Council Fellowship, The Hugo Prize from the University of Montana, and was chosen for the Pudding House Press Greatest Hits. Her collection, The Ghost Openings, won the William Stafford Award for Poetry as well as the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Prize for Poetry. "Winter, Minneapolis, 1988" was published in As Is.