Debra Marquart, a winner of Narrative’s 2025 Winter Story Contest, is the author of eight books, including the memoir The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, the essay collection The Night We Landed on the Moon, and the poetry book Gratitude with Dogs under Stars. She directs the MFA program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University and teaches in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine. In addition, Marquart is a singer/songwriter, performing with her jazz-poetry rhythm-and-blues project, the Bone People.

Door-to-Door

by Debra Marquart

Within minutes we were in the bedroom.
             I know this sounds bad.
Worse still to admit I’d said, Sure,
             come on over, when the man
called to inform me I was the lucky winner
             of a ten-piece set of cutlery.

So the stranger with sharp knives arrived
             in a green-plaid polyester blazer
with a silver Kirby vacuum cleaner
             and a suitcase full of accessories
including this clear Petri-dish attachment
             lined with a cotton wafer, thin as a host,
People on couch
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