Morning. Uncle Ray in his pajamas, informing us America is turning into a country of foreign faces standing in front of broken-down churches. He cuts sloppily into a ruby-red grapefruit. Two cups of coffee into the pot, Uncle Ray announces we should be mending our fences this very afternoon, not staring at him all pink and alive with that look of hands-behind-our-backs. He suggests we mend our fences late today, at the time the sky almost faints into the colors of a Mass card, then he starts talking of Auntie Jen, of how, even in her deathbed, he went to her with messy hair, unable to sing. It’s approaching ten and still in his pajamas, Uncle Ray beckons for one more cup of coffee, imitating the gasps of trout in a plastic bucket. He tells us, holding his cup up high, as if to make a toast, that now that Auntie Jen’s been gone for seven years, he wants to find someone to love enough to love them. The kind of woman, he says, who could always have a lollipop in her mouth. Even if she were a CPA, a red lollipop would not be out of place, but would look like a precision tool as she waved it across a 30-page computer print-out. She’d be beautiful, says Uncle Ray as he goes to the kitchen to brew another pot--beautiful, he says, as the lone hunter he saw in the marsh last Sunday carrying a duck by its scruff, steam rising from its still warm blood. Susan Cavanaugh is a part-time student at Thomas Edison State College. She has been awarded two Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, a Painted Bride Quarterly award and a Best of Yankee award, 1997. Her chapbook, The Good Sense of a Bird, appeared in 1994 from Still Waters Press.