Dangerous Archipelagoes, by Stefanie Marlis

A man takes a break from his paperwork and stands thousands of miles away--on the deck of a boat in the South Pacific--years ago. He hears the water lapping on the hull and the voices below. The light pours down from the stars, from holes punched in the top of a shoe box. Everything, they say, has its time and its place. He’s doing his taxes; Jupiter is about to be struck by a comet; and he remembers a man old enough to be his father walking around on deck with one shoe.

From “Rife” by Stefanie Marlie (Sarabande Books: 64 pp., $12.95)