Steve Davenport, an Illinois writer, is the author of Uncontainable Noise (2006), which won Pavement Saw Press's Transcontinental Poetry Prize. A .PDF chapbook of his poetry and fiction is available at the website of The Literary Review, and his "Murder on Gasoline Lake," listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2007, is available as a New American Press chapbook. Recent publications include a lyrical essay in Northwest Review, poetry and fiction in The Southern Review, and a scholarly essay about Richard Hugo's poetry in All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

Vanity Fair

Why return, this flush of good blood and skin
that confuses everything, interrupts
an evening's slaughter song, pulls the long pain
from her chest, her left hip, the arm that needs
heat lost to clusters of lymph nodes dug out
like tubers, what purpose the arm's sudden

vodka warmth, its idiot leap to slap
hundred dollar bills on winning numbers
and high fives in the cancer ward, why this
return that only delivers her back,

she knowing what she knows?