Gary Stein   DYSENTERY When the third child in three months died by dehydration the mother saw signs and summoned my camera to her dirt hut where a chicken strutted guard near the little corpse. She laid him out for Easter in blue satin, his straw hat in his cold fist, candles and tortillas wrapped in last year's news to light and fortify his soul. Padre said the Nahuatl were ignorant of hygiene. Don't feed superstition with snapshots of the dead. But photos were all I had to offer grief and when the flash lit the dark walls the mother laughed. Make the white light come again. Make it come back. The print came back weeks later from a New York lab. I sent it down believing she would see her son again but not his faint halo of flies.   DARKROOM You float up beneath my fingers. I rub old sun into your hair, hear bees bother our meal beyond the lens. In the dust free air it is grass again; it is years ago not this small night. Your image whispers itself in silver, the echo so perfect I leave the room.   CLEANING THE WOOD OUT UNDER THE PORCH for Mark My friend listens to wood say free me from too many shapes. He crooks each board to the shoulder and rifles his eye down, ear cocked. He says, this edge is true, the grain tight, an old plank, probably oak. Keep this. Someday you'll be glad. I say, take it. I don't know how to turn anything into anything. To me it's a home for bent nails. Just wood with hard rain coming. Most of it is junk already: the roof of a dog's house, the end of cabinets. We shove it back under to burn next winter and shove back a few good boards my friend respects too much to take. Carpentry must have come easy to Jesus with his many fathers and mysterious ways. The rest of us work for slow miracles: grapes that bloom in the cask; one fish at a time; the fetus beneath the sea. How easily my friend's faith shapes me: the good wood rooting beneath the porch splinter by splinter.     SUBWAY When cities swell with business, cramping motion, men flow through stone, pulsed blood beneath skin. The river parts and we rattle the Times in our fast seats, invisible as a stranger's dream, nodding on the aisle. We lean toward each stop as if with hope while the train transfuses itself. What enters the heart enters between beats. Above us doors and faces wait to open to our rising like flowers dreaming. Sun blooms over each stem at the same deliberate speed. We travel the winking lights of the tunnel, space between darkness.   WHAT HE GAVE UP I was six when the doctor froze his smoke. So mother burned cartons of Luckies like leaves in the alley ash can. And dad's colors drained--a brown from deep within his fingers, the yellow etched in the marrow of his teeth. I missed the crisp cellophane shards on the sofa and the earthy autumn smell rising from the cushions in the lumpy green chair. I missed the peace smoke seeped into his lungs, how his chest filled at leisure as the light dropped down the cozy blinds in the little room slat by slat. For months we wondered at his temper, how he inhaled candy bags until his face, reddened by loss of his cloudy angel nearly burst into fire. We forget the sacrifice a father turns to habit, a kind of faith: hiding ashtrays or wiping walls of nicotine. Thirty years later when the cancer etched his bones he offered up his testicles, buying time with living coin. No doctor knew what magic part to cut out next, and when he finally went I'll bet it was his lungs that held the final pink inside him. Isn't it a measured paring down we do to save a hazy corner of the future: from our fattest appetite to the final belt-hole in the leather--a cutting back to smaller rooms, fewer steps, a slimmer piece of fish, until there's little left to choose between--us and just the air, just the smoke we're bound for.     Gary Stein's poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Antietam Review, Folio, Gargoyle, and other journals and anthologies. One of his poems, "Remembering the Rabbits," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, currently serves as Book Review Editor for Poet Lore, and co-edited a poetry anthology, Cabin Fever (The Word Works, 2004).   Published in Volume 5, Number 3, Summer 2004. credits