Poet’s Introduction: This poem arrived musically and I followed the music into places of reverie my mother’s songs and stories used to take me. There was a lot of blue, an incantatory “cahootian music” all through, much of which I cut. In the first draft notes I see that it’s the day Stephen Hawking died. I’d forgotten this but it makes an odd kind of sense, Cahoots being a place both inside and outside time, a place of possibility, where you could be congruent as noon. I don’t remember when or how I learned it wasn’t a real place. Though of course it is. In my mind.
In Cahoots
Our mother knew a lot of people in Cahoots.
We wanted to go there. Look at us,my sister and I screeched, pulling
brown bags over our dull faces,we’re in Cahoots! Upside down
in our spoons, a collusion of roots,we looked into the future—
which looked a lot like Cahoots.The moon blued in our grim kitchen.
Oven mitts hung snug as a diphthong.You could have a mind of windows in Cahoots,
Come Holy Ghost and multiple choice.Paragraphs of blue in Cahoots. And singing
the old songs with our mother.Follow the memorized streets
to the luncheonette, the red revolving stools:here is a girl slurping her innocent egg cream.
Radio waves shake the unknowabledevotions inside her. May Day and snow day.
Rows of stubby pencils scribbling.People died softly in Cahoots—together, on porches,
looking onto familiar streets, voicespouring through them, holding their sister’s hair.
Death was a comma. By yourself you were neveralone. Inside and outside, congruent as noon.
From Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton. Copyright © 2026 by Donna Masini.
