FOR KEEPS

Teeth in a row. Ma never let me learn to box. Good for her.

Helen requesting no ice in her restaurant water. I want to keep her.

She is gone. I write her name on the list of primary considerations.

Secondary consideration: the man who works at the local gas station

doesn’t realize but provides us a curfew. Are we seeing Alan tonight?

We chide each other over second then third beers. Let’s go see Alan, we say.

On the way, alive things: pigeon hardly moving near the mouth

of the underpass; snowflake; pub not brimming but noisy.

We arrive at Alan’s and select our poisons: mint gum, KitKat, 10pm ramen.

Alan smiles, scans the tiny items, hands us extra dog treats even though

our dogs are asleep in the beds we consider ours. We do the same thing over

and over, it is not a ritual: we know the end but not the end result.

Tertiary considerations: trap doors, seedlings, snowplows,

clean socks, rings on every finger, my knees, salt, lips, silk, the tiny hairs

on my tiny toes. I’d even keep the long, dark tunnel pointed toward today’s

home. I’d even keep the flickering kitchen light I never remember to fix.

About the Author

Yetta Rose Stein reads and writes in Livingston, Montana. She is a graduate of Hellgate High School and holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in POETRY, Tahoma Literary Review - where she was nominated for the Best New Poets Anthology - and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writing Conference. In 2026, she won Montana Quarterly's Big Snowy Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She is the daughter of Nancy and Gary.