Butterfly Chair I can see it again tonight in rough outline where the clear-cuts rise and slant up the valley: the middle room of the flat where I grew up, a corner space for the television where I watched the quarrels spill like hot oil flowing from kitchen to parlor, my father holding my mother by the forearm to keep her steady while he hit her, the two of them silvered, and me slung in the butterfly chair, the rounded canvas bottom so deep, my feet didn't reach the floor. Transfixed, a moth awash in the light of what it wants so much, I would stare through them into the window of the tube, and its brightness, holding onto a glassy wish that I would die. -- Fred Marchant