A poem by Stephen Dunn and short fiction by Rebecca Lee and Etgar Keret

~
You shouldn't be surprised that the place 
you always sought, and now have been given, 
carries with it a certain disappointment. . . . 
--From "The Inheritance," a poem by Stephen Dunn, The New Yorker (September 4, 2017), p. 28.

It was the terrine that got to me.  I felt queasy enough that I had to sit in the living room and narrate to my husband what was the brutal list of tasks that would result in a terrine: devein, declaw, decimate the sea and other animals, eventually emulsifying them into a paste which could then be riven with whole vegetables.
--From "Bobcat," a short story by Rebecca Lee, in Bobcat & Other Stories (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2013), pp. 1-30.  "Bobcat" was originally published as a chapbook with Madras Press, 2010.

This old house, belonging to my friends Lesley and Andy, had been built in 1904 in a neighborhood that pretended it was on solid ground--old, Victorian homes with pillars and porticoes--but if you stepped through the screen door into the garden out back, you could feel the sand under your feet, and despite Lesley's beautiful mazes of trees, you could tell the ocean had been here not long ago, and would be again.
--From "Settlers," a short story by Rebecca Lee, in Bobcat & Other Stories (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2013), pp. 195-209. 

Dad wouldn't buy me a Bart Simpson doll.  Mum actually said yes, but Dad said I was spoiled.  "Why should we, eh?" he said to Mum.  "Why should we buy him one?  All it takes is one little squeak from him and you jump to attention."  Dad said I had no respect for money, that if I didn't learn it when I was young when would I?  Kids who get Bart Simpson dolls too easily grow up to be louts who steal from kiosks, because they're used to getting whatever they want the easy way.  So instead of a Bart Simpson doll he bought me an ugly china pig with a flat hole in its back, and now I'll grow up to be OK, now I won't be a lout.
--From "Breaking the Pig," a short story by Etgar Keret, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu, in The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories (Riverhead Books, 2015), pp. 27-30.  "Breaking the Pig" was first published in Hebrew in Missing Kissinger (Zmora Bitan, 1994).