When I was in the seventh grade, I thought I could control dice with my mind. My middle school drama class was on a bus driving south from Tampa, on our way home from the Florida State Junior Thespian Competition. At a store near the convention center, my friend Vanessa had bought something called The Psychic Abilities Exercise…
We fly from Hawaii to Japan in order to meet the submarine. Once we get on base to check in, our Officer in Charge receives a message from the Fleet Commander that says ‘Due to inclement weather, the submarine will not be able to pull into port for at least one more week.’ He turns and says,…
It was a hot, dry June and Paul was already discussing what we would do for New Year’s. 1948 seemed to sneak up on us from out of the hills. Paul wanted to travel down to Vienna. I’d never been, but he had. We had lingered in Italy after the war had finished with us, just letting…
Bunny has a gun and she’s off her meds again. She hovers around table #6 because she’s sweet on Spanish Pete, who always eats alone on All-You- Can-Eat Taco Night at Fiesta Cantina. From the kitchen, we watch them flirt. They are old, married to other people, and unhappy most of the time. Shelby, my girlfriend, flicks my ear for…
When we made them, they were mere bundles of light and flesh. They couldn’t speak, we thought, because we didn’t make them for speaking. At first they had no faces, because we didn’t make them so they could look upon ours. We made them so we could reap from them what we needed—a heart, a liver, a pound of flesh….
Imagine you have a story to tell. It’s a story about hope, loss, tragedy, and courage. It’s your story. Now imagine trying to write this story having grown up in a country where education was denied to you, where telling your story has been criminalized. And then picture writing it in a second language. The…
Ashen face in a doorframe and a memory of flame (something unresolved)— Would you know me? Would I know you in your new form? Is this an invention, a number I didn’t call? My cowardice as doppelgänger given form A violent rainstorm leaves the earth upturned —I wanted them back but not like this. It’s always…
They say that there is a city in every lady. My woman is superlative. She is a universe of her own and I have been fortunate enough to exist in her orbit. I trace the constellations on her neck for a pattern to her chaos, but her science remains undefined. I run my fingers through her…
What I know: She had mouth cancer and hadn’t eaten for days. I saw her once take a hot dog cold out of the fridge and eat it standing in the corner of the kitchen, facing the wall. It made her gag.
I know she had been quietly waiting for his return. I know it in the way she went about her work, calm and fidgety at the same time. Peeling potatoes, gouging out the eyes, scrubbing the dining room floor, hauling the neighbor man’s laundry up the alley, a wicker basket swaying on her hip.
I know it in the way she pulled my ponytail too high and tight, until my temples ached, and said, come straight home after school. I need you to watch Boggy. She wound the ponytail into a knot at the top of my head, asked, why are you still standing there, looking like a Chinaman.
You should have seen her bottom lip, then, outsized, the color of raw steak, as if it had been punched every day of her life.
When I got home, Boggy was in his high chair, wailing, pounding the tray with his fists. Bits of mashed carrot flecked the wall. When I pulled him out of the chair, his diaper hung like a sandbag to his knees. Boggy smelled like floodwater, like worms, like the ammonia she used to clean the windows.
Boggy and I sprawled on her bed watching the Democratic National Convention and the neighbors in the next apartment were watching Green Acres and I ate Bugles wearing my baby doll pajamas and the curtains lifted and brushed my cheek and Boggy stuck his finger up my nose. I wanted to marry Bobby Kennedy and have twelve or thirteen babies with him. Like Ethel did.
I know she left her cigarettes behind. An open pack of Virginia Slims— menthol—on the kitchen counter. After I put Boggy in his crib, I sat on the stoop, watching the rain, and taught myself to smoke, one cigarette at a time.
What I don’t know is where she went that night. Who she saw, what she did, if she ever found my father, or if she was even looking for him. I don’t know why she abandoned our Ford Falcon somewhere on Fourth Street, so far from home. Maybe it was only a matter of wanting to see for herself, of wanting to get just a little bit closer, to find out what raindrops do to the soft flowing surface of a river.
Stagnant air hangs over the beach. Dancers defy the oppressive heat and flock by the video wall, while Shareef, glazed purple from the lights, lies back on the white leather couch in his fine Italian suit. I lean over so my hair falls—a curtain to hide us as I approach his lips. He’s tempted, but pulls away….
was a strand of scenic overlooks.
I first wrote strange
—a strange of scenic overlooks—
my mistake, and strange enough was everything bathed in the red Mars dust of Sedona, the iron in the rocks aligned with iron in our blood, they say, so it tugs on us. It tugged. Every night on Airport Mesa, a crowd gathered and the Milky Way made a white mess of the sky. Was I the only one who’d wanted to polish it black again? Our honeymoon was a scene of stranded overlooks. We posed for panoramic photographs minus the photographs. Behind us the canyon was banded red, copper, purple
—millions of years
of compressed sunsets—
where the river had gnawed down to bone, down to its strange, scenic marrow.
The soybean fields flooded and froze over,
and the boys—not yet their father’s sons, not yet
worrying about crop stubble beneath the ice—
skate, twilight settling in their hair,
until their mother, watching at the window,
calls them in for supper. When it’s dark
they’ll sit elbow-to-elbow at the worn farm table
each son will want when she’s gone,
ringing spoons against the sides of bowls,
that silver-on-ceramic note. But now they glide
across the ice, not yet worrying about surfaces
that barely hold them, and there is nothing
between them and their mother but the clear
syrup of old glass. It moves so slowly, no one sees.
Beloveds, I keep picturing it
this way: we’re standing, all of us,
between the Bear and every creature
the Bear calls prey, and half of us
step aside. Half of us aren’t enough
to hold the Bear. It lumbers,
then, in a blur of claws and mange,
charges through. What did you think
would happen? The Bear would lose
its appetite? The Bear might be tamed
with a tiny bicycle, a propeller hat,
a gold sphere to balance on its nose?
I don’t need to describe what happens
next: the smell of blood, the surprise
of white femur. Ones I have called
beloved, I keep picturing you
this way: sitting off to one side,
watching the Bear work, waiting to see
if it leaves any meat on the bones.