Window House by Dan Pinkerton
I went window shopping & came home with a spate
of fresh windows, hinging them to the current crop
to erect what could be called a glass house but is
in fact a window house. When raising the sashes
to admit some fresh air, I temporarily
shift the whole structure so that only a windblown
armature remains. Standing in my window house,
I feel like the guts of a med school cadaver.
If forced to choose, I’d say my favorite gut is the
large intestine, so limber, so unassuming,
search terms I employ on the dating website. Dates
are irked by my window house. One called it an ant
farm, another an x-ray. Dates are spooked when I
ask them which gut is their favorite, though I think the
choice of organ says a lot about a person.
You’d be amazed how many say spleen, how few say
the skin. People sometimes claim they puked their guts out,
but no one ever says he puked his organs out,
making me doubt the proximity of the terms,
or maybe the image of the latter is just
too vivid, something pulpy and crimson plopping
onto the sidewalk. Sometimes people say the eyes
are the windows to the soul & the mouth is
the window to the organs. Some people play notes
on a thing called a mouth organ, which to me sounds
vaguely obscene. No one ever says the mouth is
her favorite organ, though it’s indeed an organ
of speech. Glass houses, like communism, are great
in theory, bad in practice, which is why I built
a window house, because people love gazing out
windows onto the landscape’s pink and pulpy guts.
Dan Pinkerton’s poems have appeared in New Orleans Review, Indiana Review, Boston Review, Subtropics, Willow Springs, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sonora Review, and River Styx, while reviews have appeared in American Literary Review, Shenandoah, Chattahoochee Review, and Pleiades. His fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Crazyhorse, Northwest Review, Arts & Letters, Washington Square, Natural Bridge, North American Review, and the 2008 edition of Best New American Voices. He is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes and an AWP Intro Journals award, and his fiction manuscript was a past finalist in the Flannery O’Connor Award competition.
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