Two Prose Poems by Brad Field: SAIL CATS, Sex Roles

SAILCATS

Used to be I could pick one up out of the road, all flat and thin, take it by
one edge, rear back, and just spin it out, watch it sail over across the field
so nice, nature's own ecological frisbee.

Some were cats, some were rabbits or squirrels, varmints of any kind, but we
used to call them all cats, sailcats. After being run over by cars and pick-up
trucks some fifty times or more on those old dirt roads, we could hardly tell
what they were before, so round and flat and thin. It was a temptation to give
one a spin and watch it sail that seemed pointless to resist.

I don't find them like that any more. Since they black-topped these country
roads, a varmint makes just a bloody mess without all that nice fine dirt
ground to give it stiffness, so it'll sail, spinning quick in the sun, catch a
rising thermal, maybe, over some hell-hot cornfield, sailing on and on, over
beyond the edge of the hill, until we'd think that the thing would never stop
at all, at all...

Sex Roles

It come to me that I’d been away a spell
when I heard the waitress recite
half her family history to someone in the booth behind,
to explain why the hot biscuits were all gone,
while I watched a man sitting by the window,
staring out, get his soup,
and go on shaking in salt before he even tasted it,
all the time keeping his eye
on something going on outside,
and I knew then
that I was back down here
where the women talk
and the men salt.

Copyright 2009, Brad Field. © This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.

Most of Brad Field's success as a writer has been with plays: won some prizes, productions at the Madison Rep., 
Cleveland Play House, South Bend Civic, Ann Arbor Bijoux, Kalamazoo, Pittsburgh, off-off Broadway..His 
fiction has appeared in Blue Line, New Voices, Bellingham Review, Arachne, Parting Gift, the Sun, and won a prize.