Adjusting

by Margaret Donovan Bauer

Take the knife out of the drainboard basket,
lay it flat in the drainboard;
he can’t see it as he passes through the kitchen
(which he pretends to admire).
A seemingly innocuous call out to his wife,
she recognizes as panicked:
he cut himself shaving
and can’t tell how bad it is.
But he pretends he can see
His daughter’s new river home view.

A native of South Louisiana, Margaret Donovan Bauer is the Rives Chair of Southern Literature and Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. In 2017, she received the North Carolina Award for Literature for her two decades as editor of the North Carolina Literary Review. She is also the author of four books on Southern writers, most recently A Study of Scarletts: Scarlett O’Hara’s Literary Daughters, but since that book, she has turned to writing a memoir about growing up in Deep South Louisiana. Read her previously published work in Deep South here.