It’s all of it rigged, she says,

Bust-one-wins, Hi-striker, even the Dozer.

It’s like you think you’ll score that giant panda

for the wife except you can’t, or not

without you drop another twenty

and then—what?—then you win

a thumb-sized monkey or a little comb.

She hands me five ones and then stands.

She’s worked the whole of the midway,

she says, funnel cake to corn-dogs.

She’s worked every game

plus half the rides, Krazy Koaster,

Avalanche, Wing-Ding, Tilt-a-Whirl

and if there’s somebody sick she’ll do

a kiddy ride too, Li’l Choo-choo, maybe

the Tea Cup.

There’s a collapsing soft sigh

and she sits, opens the paper, turns a page

and as if she were the one assigned to face forwards,

as if it were her job to intuit the world

and interpret the news,

Anymore, she says, it’s out of our hands,

it’s all we can do—it’s not up to you.

You see that bald bronco tearing

tickets at the carousel?

We worked the Bottle-drop

and now he’s mine: he’s no genius

but he loves me and he’s mine.

Things happen, she says, you

can’t take them back.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by the Alaska Quarterly Review. Mark Kraushaar’s most recent book of poems is The Uncertainty Principle, Waywiser Press, 2012. Poem reprinted from the Alaska Quarterly Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 & 2, by permission of the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.