"Dreams of Affluence" & "The Weather Balloon"

So I was trying to figure out how to come up with a series of random numbers (for logging in manuscripts) when it occurred to me to just Google it. Found this way cool random integer generator at Random.org. Super duper.
* * *

This week's featured chap is a day late. We're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but in this case--I love the covers on this chapbook series from Godine. Here are two poems from Ann Deagon's There Is No Balm in Birmingham:

Dreams of Affluence

I am a housewife vacuuming
her swimming pool. Under my toes
under the blue vinyl, moles
hump their tunnels. The cat
lays them pale and dripping at
our doorstep. She has learned
how to dive. The chlorine
has bleached her white.
You cannot tell her from a mole.

I am diving through my life.

The Weather Balloon

In June at seven from the pool
the clearest-eyed child
cries out, has sighted
the weather balloon, tiny as
a bead of quicksilver, a bubble
caught under fathoms of blue.
It will not surface here
where our yard beaches the sky.
At sea in air it drifts, its whole
purpose that drifting. Meteorologists
plot its azimuth. We train
binoculars and our binocular gaze
on its uncaring passage. Our round
pool blinks back the sky. We think
we are tethered. We are all of us
at sea.