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In my all-time favorite cinematic exchange, Jane Greer plays a mobster’s runaway moll in a Mexican casino. She asks a sleepy-eyed Robert Mitchum if there’s a way to win at roulette. This is before his turn as the preacher in The Night of the Hunter, my mother’s number one flick, those scared kids drifting down the gothic southern river as Mitchum gives chase with his knuckle tattoos that spawned infinite imitations. RKO sold Greer as “the woman with the Mona Lisa smile,” the effect of a facial palsy she suffered in her teens. Sometimes a psychotic killer gets run off by a woman with a shotgun. Sometimes a broken face wins a movie deal. Not that you should take the bet. Mostly people don’t win at roulette; there’s no strategy for it. But as Mitchum tells Greer, there’s a way to lose more slowly.

swing

The pitcher’s no phenom. His ERA’s just all right. But he’s got this batter’s number. It’s like he plugs in the formula, gets the result, and there’s no more point to analyzing it than asking why people fall in love, stay that way, and top it off by dying within a week of each other. As for the batter? He thinks knowing the future leaves a lot to be desired. Still, he trudges to the box. Two pairs of eyes lock across sixty feet, six inches. It’s someone else’s job to call balls and strikes, but this? They don’t know what to call this anymore.

turn

Goya’s black paintings started as untitled murals worked on the wallpaper inside his home. After he died, the murals were cut out, stretched over canvas, given names, put into the Prado. They share one room now, these visions that used to be divided. You can look at them all together, spinning slowly around and getting queasy. It’s a lot to take in, half student, half tourist, barely out of your teens, wearing blue jeans and surprise, still digesting a characteristically Spanish ham sandwich.  





Maureen Thorson is the author of three books of poetry: "Share the Wealth" (Veliz Books 2022), “My Resignation” (Shearsman 2014), and “Applies to Oranges” (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). Her book of lyric essays, "On Dreams," was published with Bloof Books in 2023. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, 32 Poems, and Laurel Review. She lives in Falmouth, Maine. 

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