Debra Marquart is the author of three poetry collections, including Small Buried Things, as well as a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories. Her memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, was awarded the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. A finalist in Narrative’s Fourth Annual Poetry Contest and in the 2017 Winter Story Contest, she serves as professor of English and director of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University and teaches in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Southern Maine.

Door-to-Door

by Debra Marquart

Within minutes we were in the bedroom.
             I know this sounds bad.
Worse still to admit I’d said, Sure,
             come on over, when the man
called to inform me I was the lucky winner
             of a ten-piece set of cutlery.

So the stranger with sharp knives arrived
             in a green-plaid polyester blazer
with a silver Kirby vacuum cleaner
             and a suitcase full of accessories
including this clear Petri-dish attachment
             lined with a cotton wafer, thin as a host,
People on couch
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