William Heath has published four poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, Going Places, Alms for Oblivion (a fifth, Prime Time, in early 2026); three chapbooks. Night Moves in Ohio, Alms for Oblivion, Inventing the Americas; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, Blacksnake’s Path; a history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); a book of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Hiram College. He lives in Annapolis. www.williamheathbooks.com
Suburban Rites
In the supermarket little old ladies
in a mad rush to get at the cottage cheese
smack her heels with their carts
while she prefers to stroll the aisles,
savoring each item and imagining
scrumptious meals to fix for friends.
While wives pause and purchase,
the pale, abstract faces of the men
drain in the neon as they steer carts
with spectral hands. A gum-chewing
housewife in stretch pants, hair curlers,
slaps a child who shows no surprise,
doesn’t bother to cry.
“What did you watch last night?”
one woman asks another in the line
at the check-out counter. When
the cashier pokes the register in
the nose its mouth shoots open.
Each wheels out bags of over-
priced, over-wrapped groceries
including meats of a succulent redness
from a sodium sulfite rubdown fit
for the barbeque pit and the high caste
ritual of weenie roasts, ancient
pig sacrifices, cooked on a holy altar
of charcoal, consumed in the sacrosanct
grove of a private backyard.
A House in the Country
I bought a house in the country
of sandstone hewn by an Italian
mason with hammer and chisel.
I plant a garden, become
a naturalized citizen as seasons
turn. From my porch while the sun
sets I bear witness to the soothing
crimson death of each day.
Chiefly I delight in green trees
I did not plant, weeds in multi-
colored flower, and the tan deer
at dusk standing on hind legs
to eat unripe apples. Two raccoons
curl up in the highest fork of
a persimmon tree, spill purple
droppings on my brown wood pile.
In season the raccoons feed
without stop on ripe cherries,
smearing the walkway with
yellow seeds, then sleep off
their wanton feast. At night
my talico cat slips out to inspect
the cherry tree and, without
recognition, not a hiss, walks past
a black-masked raccoon. One
morning when I set a bowl out
on the porch, my cats gather to eat
beside a pink-nosed possum.
An Accident
If the car I’m following weaves
onto a rumble strip, I assume
the driver is drunk and stay back.
Given such frequent erratic behavior
I expect to see more accidents.
When two cars race past me at over
a hundred miles an hour I stare
into the distance for a dark blue
plume of smoke and twisted metal
in the shape of modern sculpture.
Driving a Florida country road
by a field of strawberries, a pickup
in front of me, packed with migrant
workers, suddenly swerves, tips over,
sends people in the back sprawling
in all directions. Two women
stand in a stupor that might pass
for indifference. A man slumps
down in the truck’s cab, waiting
for the bleeding to stop. One, back
broken, lies bent on the pavement
as if he had been dropped from
a great height, while howling children
run barefoot around the wreck
stepping on shattered glass.
New England
Cape Cod elbows out into the Atlantic,
an arm that beckons, a hook that caught,
a scythe that reaps the saints in sheaves
before their time. At first sight of armed men,
the Indians run into the trees leaving behind
corn fields and burial grounds, their houses
of bent saplings, and huge piles of seashells.
As Pocahontas brings tobacco, so Squanto corn,
showing the Pilgrims how to drop a fertile trinity
of herring in each hole beside resurrecting kernels.
They establish their palisaded Utopia
and praise the Lord, quickly developing
an aversion for the very Indians who save
their bodies from starvation. Their quest for
the Northwest Passage, the geographical grail,
always ends in a stream’s narrowing serpentine
windings or a ship’s shallow soundings.
The true wealth of New England lies off
the coast, along aquatic banks, in silver
schools of cod and other feeding fish.
Welcome to Scotland
At Ullapool our guide has
sandy blond hair, a raspy voice,
and keen blue/green eyes.
Her fishing village of two-story
white-washed houses faces
a long dock and runs three streets
deep before yielding to a rocky
hillside of pasture land for
grazing clusters of sheep.
For a thousand years the town
has lived off the sea’s bounty:
“darling herring” the prime catch
as well as shrimp, cod, and other
tasty morsels of the deep.
Nowadays Spain is the main
market, yet in the past herring,
packed in brine, fed slaves
on Caribbean plantations.
She thinks it a bad idea to send
salty food to people in tropical climes,
though sodium replenishes what
the body loses by sweating.
As for herself, she never eats
any creatures that lives underwater.
Surf & Turf is a one-course meal.
How confident she is in her Scotch
stubbornness, not a wee hint of doubt
in her firm position. You might think
a tour guide would be cosmopolitan
and open to new experiences,
yet her village is a prized spot for seafood
she has no intention to ever taste.
The Galway Review 