Category: Literary Features

Two Poems

To My Caring and Worried Mother

There are sliced carrots in the shape of a cowbell,
because I understand
that great food should sing to you.

 

There’s a movie we’ve never seen before
and a Japanese instruction manual.

 

There’s a novel about Alzheimer’s
and some magic memory pills for your mother.
There’s an automatic food dispenser
so you don’t have to bend down to feed the dogs anymore.

 

There’s a travel bag with a Bible
and a plane ticket to Paris.

 

There’s a color-coded flow chart
describing the best way to carry a conversation with Grandma.
In the bottom right hand corner, in fine print, it explains
you may have to adopt new tactics on the fly.

 

I caught Grandma watching
The Hulk in Spanish today.
I just flipped to the English version.

 

To my caring and worried mother:
raising your voice won’t help,
there is no cure.

 

All the Post-It notes
on all the cabinets
should say: open with caution,
eat with intensity,
remember,
we love you
and we’ll help you
find the watch
you stuffed in the cookie jar.

 

Elegy

The horse
nuzzles the back of my hand
as if the damp home of its nose
could stand not one more dark
second of this unfettered freeze.

 

What of it,
she asks after we’ve had our hot
meat and stale versions of drug,
sitting in lotus pose
facing my grandfather’s headstone
where every engraved sentence
curved tinsel of truth
into the steaming mouth of myth.

 

This barrel-bellied man
made a small southern town
seem like a place God had visited
and forgot to bless.
He was that damn bold,
that unforgettable.

Share

Love Like Orange

My father’s love was orange. It could be warm and milky like summer Creamsicles, boisterous and magnetic as a dancing flame, or deep and foreboding as the morning sunrises sailors avoid. Every Saturday morning, he clocked in, arriving at my grandmother’s house at nine in the morning. My brother, Justin, and I waited at the front screen door, fidgeting and rocking in our criss-cross-applesauce positions, my mother standing in another room biting her nails.

 

We only needed our ears to alert us of his arrival: the slow whir of a car driving past the house followed by the crunch of gravel as it made a U-turn. The barely detectable squeak of brakes as a car came to a stop. The slam of a heavy door closing, the clap of footsteps, and, finally, the chirp of the car announcing the locking of its doors.

 

Sometimes he arrived bearing gifts of the stuffed bear variety or a chocolate orange wrapped in bright tinfoil that, to us, was as valuable as real gold. And other times he arrived in ghoulish masks to terrify Justin.

 

“For Christ’s sake, stop being a baby,” he barked in irritation, removing the Alf mask as my brother sobbed and hiccupped from fright.

 

“He’s only three; of course he’s scared,” my mother cried, stroking Justin’s back.

 

“You’re always babying him.”

 

These standoffs between my parents could last for as few as thirty seconds and as long as weeks. Tears could quickly turn to laughter as we climbed the apricot tree, bright green with orange fuzzy polka dots hanging from limbs and littering the grass.

 

In the backyard, Justin giggled while swaying forward and back in a swing fashioned out of a splintered four-by-two plank and manila rope as course as sandpaper.

 

“Higher,” he laughed. Our father obliged.

 

He was ours until sunset when he clocked out just as swiftly as he’d arrived. While walking to his car, we sent him off with a parade of waves, parroting “Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye!” back and forth as if he were leaving for war and we didn’t know when he’d return. The bright orange sky bounced off his car as it pulled out onto the road.

 

We waved with our apricot-stained hands until his car disappeared down the street. These days escaped us in a blur of tickles and laughs and tears and shouts and sweet coos of love. We would forget almost everything except the tang of orange that sat bitterly on our tongues.

—

My father’s love was indigo, as deep and distant as the continental slope we feared would swallow us whole. Sitting on his shoulders, I levitated five feet and nine inches above the ground, scanning the ocean for whales we’d never see this far south.

 

“Be careful,” my mother warned, which only instigated him to run.

 

I bounced on his bony shoulders, and then slipped forward and onto the sand. My mother and Justin screamed, and my father scowled, an electrical current of smoky, rich blue pulsating from his veins. Above me, furrowed brows and wide eyes collided, but all I saw were their indigo shadows wrestling on the sand. My mother surrendered, but my father’s palms were stained electric. He stormed ahead of us at a gait our legs couldn’t match.

 

We called for him: “Wait! Wait! Wait!”

 

He was too far ahead and could only hear the waves and seagulls, or so he said later. We lost him among the sea of beach umbrellas and Styrofoam coolers and barbeque smoke and waxed surfboards.

 

On the pier, we had a better view, and we each claimed a direction to survey. We spun around hoping to pinpoint the man with dark hair, dark eyes, and tanned skin. My mother always said he looked like a Greek fisherman, so we looked to the ocean beyond the end of the pier for the dark shadow of a man who’d had enough of life on land and all that comes with it. We felt for his currents of indigo that connected him to us like an invisible leash that tied families together.

 

“Frank!” my mother shouted.

 

“Papa, papa, papa,” Justin and I repeated.

 

And then, as always, he materialized behind us.

 

“I’m right here; you can stop making a goddamn scene with your hysterics.”

 

If there’s one thing my father hated more than life among mortals, it was attention from them. We followed him back to the car, our legs marching in double-time to keep up with his long strides. He fought in Vietnam, but the leave-no-man-behind warrior ethos did not apply here. Our feet sunk as the sand grabbed at our ankles, and we hoped we wouldn’t be left behind.

—

My father’s love was cherry—tart and sweet in the same bite. It was layered with unexpected gestures we loved and hated and from which we ran away only to return and beg for more.

 

On Christmas, we saw life through cherry-stained glasses. Our living room transformed into New York City, with the dozens of crimson-wrapped gifts as its skyscrapers. It took hours to unwrap everything, and when it was over, we hunted for more and painted our father red with tinsel and kisses.

 

With flushed cheeks and dilated pupils, we ran in circles, incapable of exhausting ourselves. We scrambled up couches like Mount Everest and excavated cardboard boxes for buried treasures, stopping only for a bite of chocolate from our stockings.

 

“That’s enough,” my father warned us. He was jubilant until he wasn’t.

 

I always received half a dozen warnings, but Justin was only given two, which was never enough for him.

 

“That’s two,” my father barked, standing from his seat.

 

Justin screamed and ran for shelter. When they returned from the back bedroom minutes later, one of Justin’s wrists matched the scarlet of my father’s right palm; it was what inadvertently linked them, like father-and-son tattoos that faded and then returned weeks later.

 

Justin’s eyes were carmine from crying, and I wondered if everything he saw was the color of Christmas. He rubbed his wrist while I connected the constellation of kisses left behind from my mother’s ruby lipstick that stained his cheek and forehead.

—

My father’s love was white—silent and opaque, hovering in a corner just above our reach. When it wasn’t bright and all-encompassing, it was the very absence of light, siphoning its warm comfort that engulfed us moments ago.

 

While Justin and I lived with our mother and grandmother in a rugged and familiar landscape of chipped paint, peeling wallpaper, and nail polish–stained quilts, my father lived in a glass castle, off limits except for today.

 

His house was a museum with carefully placed breakables that toed the edges of shelves. There were white ceramic vases with silk flowers, bronze elephants that, at the right time of day, sparkled under the skylight. There were hand-painted boxes from Russia, miniature Chinese floral vases, a globe made from rare minerals, and a cream-colored bust of Poseidon. They were untouchables we stared at with open jaws and wide eyes while on tip-toes, stroking the invisible barrier that hovered around each one.

 

We ran in the white glow of this castle until my father’s forty-five-year-old hands caught Justin’s three-year-old neck and forced him to the ground.

 

“How many times have I told you to be careful? You can’t just run around like a goddamn monkey. This isn’t a zoo!”

 

His booming voice had the incredible ability to vibrate through our bodies and cause our bones to shake in fear. Justin’s face turned white and, with wide eyes, looked pleadingly at my mother.

 

Disgust washed over my father’s face.

 

“Go. Run to your mother.”

 

“Go to him. You need to go with him,” my mother whispered to me.

 

I shook my head.

 

“Go, or he’ll just get angrier,” she pleaded.

 

I was the only one who could placate my father, a badge of honor I would have done anything to shed. After my father died, these memories felt traitorous. I would spend years repainting my past, searching for new hues, but I always returned to the same four, ending with this blinding white that would never fade.

 

Refusing to look back at my mother or brother, I stomped toward my father who snarled like a mountain lion in his cave of an office. My brother and mother retreated to a corner, licking their wounds. I cajoled my father with pleas for mercy and, eventually, guided him back to the living room where we lapped up his renewed love like milk.

Share

Two Poems: 2001 & Barbie

2001

There was no space odyssey.
Instead, more than towers fell
in the city where I live.
People were still counting
paper scraps in Florida
for the sake of a flawed process.
People were still dying
in Gujarat’s earthquaked cracks
in Ghana’s stampeded stadiums
and in the summer of the media
calling shark attacks on Santa Rosa
a national security threat.
The Taliban’s advent, McVeigh’s execution
for destroying what seemed an entire city.
I had just turned seven.
For my birthday, my mother
bought me a Beatles CD.
Later that year, George Harrison died—
my favorite one, the one
who sang about how all things must
come to an end. But
how were endings possible
in a new millennium? New
Wikipedia, where we learned
how to summarize. New Nokia,
new Madonna, even language felt
refreshed: A.I., iTunes, OS X, Xbox.
It was the first time I broke my arm
in two separate places. I visited the zoo
and watched the animals roar at each other,
and at themselves. My mother dispelled
Santa Claus, perhaps a year too soon
for my imagination to take. I cried
until I received extra presents
for keeping the secret from my sister.
I saw myself in the Backstreet Boys,
in the highest rated Super Bowl in history,
as Harry Potter, whether philosopher
or sorcerer. Everything still felt possible
to a seven-year-old, who had just
heard about the first tourist in space
and thought it was an odyssey.

 

Barbie

I comb my hair with a small hairbrush.
I no longer walk in nature. And when
I sit on the front porch, sipping
whatever’s left from the mason jar
filled with all that last night, I flick
the maggots from my skin.
The parked car outside the house
sits with its tarped over cover since before
I remember. I remember
playing dolls with my sister
while my father wedged a football
into my hands, and said
you must throw as far as you can.
Open wide, my arms onto the wheel
where I learned how a man
drives five miles above the limit.
It was cold that first Kentucky,
where I first kissed masculine lips,
wet as leather, chapped the way
we hid from what we learned
in locker rooms. We grazed the sides
of our heads against the Cypress bark.
While we leaned against its trunk, I saw
pigs in the distance, wrestling
in the nightmud. They cannot know
how soon they will be separated, then skinned.

Share

I Wake at Four & Drive to the Mountains

To leave the inner critic on the empty street beneath my windows.

To outride the arrows, or slings at least, of civic life.

To put the forces separating me from my daughter—the moderator

 in elastic-waisted slacks, the decree signed

 by the liver-spotted judge—in the rear-view.

To look ahead and see the world’s impersonal love song again

 lifted from night.

To know the song is about the attention we give the wild,

 unfixable everything we love yet is always already

 indifferent to us.

And yet to see the sun rise, like a couched friend, from blankets of fog

 in the lowland orchards.

To see the fields of our anxieties cut and gathered in silos.

To hear the wind wrap us, undeserving, in the sun’s resolve

 to sustain us another day.

 

To stuff a campsite into my backpack and somehow walk ten miles.

To feel the weight of our basic needs shouldered across streams,

 over hills, up crevices.

To remember having walked the home-forsaken trail before.

To realize I’d compressed memory of all this pain—all but the sacrament

 of red, gold and orange leaves

 above river bluffs.

 

Only here do I realize I must have forgotten just how many uphills,

 just how fucking much elevation hurts.

Here I think such thoughts as our sapiens ancestors ground as many miles

 over mountains each day.

I wake and drive and walk to think: Perhaps the downhill mortar and pestle

 of our patellae almost crushes recall

 of profane elevation.

And to meet the inner critic, somehow already at the top, and

 to accept his message:

You wake at four and drive to the mountains

to accept the body’s pain as the cost of all the beauty there is to see.

Share

To My Fellow Submitters

A found poem from sample rejections saved in “My Submissions,”
completed in response to a writing prompt given at
the Sandhill Writers Retreat, May 2019

 

Dear

Dear

Dear

Our poets’ community is lucky to have you

Good fortune in all your future writing

Declined

Cannot offer

We enjoyed having the chance to read

Many excellent entries this year

The team wishes you

We wish each of you the best in finding publishers

All the best

Unfortunately

The sweat and the perseverance it takes to put together a submission and send it out, naked

Declined by

Not Selected

A strong and competitive batch

A complimentary copy of this year’s

We regret

We are grateful for your ideas

We encourage you to submit again in the future

We are unable to provide individual feedback

Thanks

Best

Appreciate the dedication to craft

Thank you for choosing us

Hope that you and your work succeed in finding a home

You’re now one step closer to getting that acceptance you’ve been looking for

Sincerely

In peace and poetry

Share

The Ball Spun

I arrived at the playground with Armin. It was a late afternoon in June; the rays of sunshine broke through the thick white clouds in places, illuminating patches of the tramped grass. Armin’s parents had sent him another package, a brand-new soccer ball in it. It was yellow with blue spots. He held it close to his chest as we sauntered down the street to the playground.

 

Armin and I hung out regularly. He lived in my neighborhood with his grandma. Armin’s parents worked in Austria as guest workers. Most of his life he spent with his grandma, seeing his parents once a year. Armin had toys I’d never seen before: remote-operated cars built of high-quality steel, model planes, and handheld video games. He brought to school all sorts of foreign candy, neatly wrapped, colorful, with pictures of cartoon characters.

 

Armin talked a lot, while I was a quiet type. He talked so much on our way to school that we often ended up being late. When I stopped by his place before school, I’d find him in the bathroom in front of the mirror, looking at himself and combing his blond curls. “What do you think, Edi?” he’d say. “Looking good, man. That schmuck, Sinan, is a goner. Selma is my girl. Hey, let me show you a new thing I got.” He was never ready on time, and the school was three kilometers away—a long walk.

 

The playground was deserted. We started kicking the ball from one rusted goal post to another. A few minutes later, we noticed a group of boys walking towards us. They were in their late teens. As soon as we saw them we knew we were in trouble. After all, two eleven-year-olds stood no chance against a gang of high-schoolers. Their ring leaders were two brothers. The older brother, Kasim, was as dark as the asphalt on the road he’d just crossed. He was skinny and long—all limbs. His round head bobbed on top of his body like a ball with two black eyes perched above a bulbous nose. Kasim’s brother, Vedad, was a year younger. He had long, brown hair he’d always tie into a ponytail. Vedad was notorious for his vicious smile that revealed two long canines. He was short and sturdy, his legs sinewy and fast. He was the best soccer player in town.

 

Kasim intercepted our pass and took the ball. Vedad shouted, “Come on, man! Be nice and share.” Kasim kicked the ball hard to the other three boys trudging behind him.

 

“Give the ball back, assholes!” Armin blurted out, and before finishing the sentence he looked at me, surprised by his own words.

 

“Whoa, man! The kid’s got a foul mouth.” Kasim sniggered. “Isn’t that Aunt Zinka’s grandson?”

 

“Time to teach him a lesson,” Vedad said. He picked up the ball like a pro, bouncing it on his knees, his ponytail prancing up and down. “Tell me, little punk!” he said. “Whose ball is this? It’s damn good. Real leather. Made in Germany.”

 

“It’s mine,” Armin said.

 

“Of course, little chicken shit.” Vedad said. “Did your mama send it from Germany?”

 

“From Austria,” Armin shot back.

 

“Would you, please, give us the ball back?” I interjected.

 

“This one here is a nice boy.” Vedad nodded towards me and balanced the ball between his foot and his shin.

 

“Listen, nice boy,” he said. “I have an idea. You get the ball and we let you play if you two show us your kung fu skills.”

 

“No way,” Armin cried. “You guys will mow the lawn with us.”

 

“Who said we’d do anything?” Kasim said. “We don’t fight little pussycats. We want you to fight each other.”

 

“Why would we do that?” I said.

 

“Because that’s the only way you get the ball back. And if you beat this mama’s boy, the ball is yours. Isn’t that so, mama’s boy?”

 

Armin looked at me, then at Vedad and Kasim. “The ball is mine,” he said.

 

I held my gaze on Kasim and nodded hesitantly. As long as I could remember, the only soccer ball I ever had was a bubamara, which meant ladybug. The bubamaras were often the only choice for the working-class kids in Yugoslavia. They were made of cheap rubber and lasted only for a few weeks. After a couple of good games, bubamaras turned into sad-looking, egg-shaped spheres, their innards dangling through the ripped outer layer.

 

I was bigger than Armin and stronger. Armin was all mouth, that cocky fool. We both knew I could take him out easily. I walked over to where he stood and looked at him up close.

 

“Let’s do this,” Armin said and jumped on me, climbing on my shoulder. He got me in a choke hold and held me down with all his might. Everybody lined up around us, grunting, yelling, and laughing—Kasim and Vedad in the opposite corners. I steadied myself, not letting him push me down on my knees.

 

I wiggled out of Armin’s hold and was about to strike him, but Vedad and Kasim grabbed us and pulled us apart. I felt Kasim’s firm grip on my elbows.

 

“Listen,” he shouted over my head. “You two start when we say.” He shook my whole body as if to reset me and said, “Now you go.”

 

I was fast this time. I tackled Armin to the ground and shoved his face into the grass. Kneeling on his back, I bent one of his arms backwards and held it tight, twisting and bending it towards his shoulder blades. After a few minutes he stopped wriggling.

 

The brothers pulled us apart again. Vedad laughed and said, “Man, that was ugly. But fun.”

 

Gasping for air, I gaped at his wolf teeth. He’d drawn his lips up to his ears.

 

Armin was in tears. “Asshole!” he screamed at me. “You’ll pay for this.” He ran towards home.

 

Kasim took the ball in his hands and spun it on his forefinger. “Get lost, nice boy,” he said.

 

—

 

Three years later, Armin and I were on the playground again when eight-year-old twins, Mirza and Kenan, saw us from across the field and ran over to our side. They were both dark and so skinny that they looked like two roosters—their noses stuck out like two beaks, their small eyes peered from creased, dry skin. The boys looked like two old men trapped in children’s bodies. They were Roma kids. Their mother worked at the textile mill; their father was rarely around, but when he was home he’d wave at me and smile if he saw me walk by their house. We could never tell the twins apart, but this time one of them had scabs all over his head. His brother had only a few on his neck and elbows. The scabby one was Mirza.

 

“We want to play too,” Mirza croaked.

 

“Really, you little toad?” Armin raised his blond brows and smiled. “You want to play with the big boys?”

 

“Yes, of course,” Mirza said. His brother stood by him quietly.

 

“What can you give us for it?” I asked. I knew they had nothing to offer, but I liked to joke with them. The twins were dear to me.

 

“Nothing.”

 

“How about you put on a nice show for us?” said Armin. “You just have to fight a little, like in the movies.”

 

“You’re too big for us.”

 

“No, you chicken shit, you fight each other. The winner gets this ball.”

 

I looked at Armin askance. I couldn’t believe he’d give them the ball.

 

“We’re brothers.”

 

“Brothers fight,” I said.” You sometimes fight, don’t you?”

 

“Yes, we do. But Mama says if she sees us fighting again, she’ll break our arms.”

 

“Your mother is getting off work in an hour,” Armin said. “The ball is yours if you win.”

 

By now, Armin had six soccer balls and counting. His parents had brought him a ball every time they came to visit from Austria. Three years earlier, he had told his grandma about our fight. The day after he told her, I got a whipping from my father. A few months later, after we got over our fight, I asked Armin if he’d gotten his ball back. He shrugged and said he couldn’t care less. He was quiet all the way to school that day.

 

Mirza looked at his brother. Kenan was still silent. “Let’s do this,” Kenan said and

leaped onto Mirza.

 

They alternately held each other in chokeholds at first, squirming around like two hungry worms. We pulled them apart. “We’re taking a break,” I said, restraining Mirza from jumping on his brother again. I held him tight in my arms, his scabs close to my face.

 

“Let them go,” Armin said and pushed his twin into the middle of our circle. I released mine and he lunged ahead. We stepped back and watched them. I glanced at Armin. His lips were stretched into a smile, his foot resting on the ball.

 

The twins battered each other with their bony fists. Their knuckles found their heads and faces. Soon they both were bleeding. Kenan’s lip was cut open. Mirza’s nose was oozing blood. I ran over to Mirza and yanked him away. The scabs on his head were cut open and bloody too. He left red streaks on his brother’s shirt. They both were crying now. “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill the bastard,” Mirza hissed through tears and blood.

 

I pulled up the hem of Mirza’s shirt to his face, took his hand, and pressed it on his nose to stop the bleeding. In a calm but threatening tone, I said, “Go home, right away, before I beat the shit out of you.” His brother held his lip and mumbled something about cracking Mirza’s scabby head open. Mirza started running. Kenan scrammed after him. They both ran towards their home, their shirts torn and bloody.

 

I turned to Armin. His mouth was agape, his lips moving, but there was no sound. I looked down at the ball in front of him. It was unblemished, sparkly white with black spots and a large Adidas sign on it. An intense burn welled up from the pit of my stomach. I sprinted towards the ball and kicked it with all my might. The ball soared high into the broad blue sky.

Share

Things You Left in Accra before Moving to the Bronx

Grandma and her weak leg,

your sister at 18, still with one good iris,

 

your mother’s British jewelry hidden under the bed,

the places in the carpet you soiled with urine,

 

all the red dust,

 

your seat at Calvary Methodist Church next to Marie

who’d always chat with you when someone talked

about Jesus and his power to bring you all the things you needed,

 

your gymnastic booty shorts (your mother sent

them from America because the heat in Accra overwhelmed

you but you still wish you’d saved some for America’s winters),

 

warm Tea Bread sold at the YMCA between 6:30 am and 7:30 am,

the scent of air conditioning and ice cream at the SHELL gas station,

 

Grandma with her good English,

 

Mercedes and Pamela, your neighbors who borrowed everything from salt to ladles,

 

Asaana, Yooyi, Aluguntuguin, Nkontomire,

Living Bitters, Mercy Cream, Lion’s Ointment &

 

a Saturday listening to wind turn on pawpaw leaves.

Share

Summer III

Across the forest, we sit

in a deer stand shaped like a heart.

A cry comes from the center of the woods

like wind blowing through a doll’s head.

There are birds that come out at night

just to be devoured by other birds.

I can’t make things happen faster

than they’re going to happen.

I know that now.

If your thick arms come out

of the shadows only to light smokes

or hold my hand expertly in yours,

I need to accept it.

Share

when I stopped fearing ghosts

I learned about ghost hunting from my mom. When I was in elementary school, she drove me down to Louisiana every summer, and we’d stomp around the boggy summer heat in old cemeteries, reviewing etched tombstones, trying to find the names and death details for her ancestors.

 

We slogged through swamps, heavily forested areas where the heat bugs hissed so loud, I could barely hear when she called to me. We went all over the state—Mansfield, Baton Rouge, Grand Chenier. We stayed with friends in between, drinking sweet tea and eating collard greens, cornbread slathered with slices of cold butter. I was never quite sure what my mom was looking for, or why we needed to find it out there in the heat.

 

My mom was bad at picking up on things. That’s why she didn’t notice at first when a spirit latched onto her one summer in Louisiana. It just slipped out of the gravestone and sunk its claws into her, like a bad smell. The thing held tight to her all the way back to rural Vermont where we lived. I didn’t notice it at first. But then, a month or two later, it made itself known when she and I were alone at her office building one night.

 

The office building where my mom worked was four stories—a first floor, second, an attic, and a basement. I hated the second floor. It was dark and full of offices, crowded and narrow. Whenever I stayed late with my mom, I lingered on the first floor in an open office space, next to a large row of windows.

 

Sometimes she worked upstairs, and that night, she was working out of her boss’s office when I went upstairs to ask her for food money. It was dark, and the lights were off in the hallway. “Mom, can I get food money?”

 

“For what?”

 

“I want to go across the street.”

 

She hesitated, then rustled around, appearing in the doorway at the other end of the hall. There were at least five doors between us—five different offices along the hall. Some were open, some partially, one closed. I stood at one end of them. My mom was at the other. We looked at each other for a moment, and then I got the sense that something was wrong. I remember my skin prickling, like getting goosebumps in the cold, and then one of the open doors slammed shut.

 

My chest tightened. I felt the fear in my chest before my brain could register what happened. A second later, I went running for my mom.

+++

Twenty years later, I move from Vermont down to St. Pete, Florida, seeking the heat of my childhood. I get a tiny studio apartment and a new job working in development at a legal aid firm.

 

My ex-boss from Vermont texts me once a week. I keep the selfies she sends me saved in my phone and look at them when I miss her. I’m still in love with her, even though she’s married now, and I’ve moved two thousand miles away. In her texts, she tells me I’m pretty. She asks about the grants I’m writing at my new job, the beach, my friends. You’re pretty AND smart, she says, when I send her a selfie at my office. Her paragraphs always include winky faces. She doesn’t say much about herself.

 

After settling into my new office at my new job in St. Pete, I decide to decorate my desk. It’s black and chic and empty, so I print out pictures of me with my four best friends and tape them up on one of the monitors. There’s an empty space at the bottom. I leave it for a day, then print one of the selfies Lauren sent me and tape it up.

 

Back when I worked with her, Lauren and I spent eight to ten hours a day together. We went on field trips—to Stowe, to the islands, to happy hours. She told me once, on a longer trip, that things weren’t so easy for her as a child.

 

“But you’re so good with your dad,” I said. “You guys are like best friends.”

 

“It wasn’t always like that.”

 

“What was it like, then?”

 

Her mouth tightened. She was always doing weird things with her mouth – pursing her lips, parting her lips when she concentrated, these uncomfortable, awkward things that I loved watching. Sometimes, I felt her face moved on its own, like something else was guiding her that she couldn’t see or understand. “One time my brother and I were fighting, and Dad came up and,” she gestured with her hands, “wham. Knocked our heads together.”

 

“What was it like with your brother?”

 

“We hated each other,” she said. I asked why. She told me he could never forgive her for something. I waited for her to tell me what. She never did.

 

After two or three days of having her picture up at the office, I take it off the computer monitor and tuck it away inside my desk. I don’t look at it often, but sometimes, when I get out tea to brew, her face will come into view—the blonde hair, the freckles. Every time I see it, I think about those months I spent listening to her plan her wedding, talking about bridesmaids and dinner menus. I think about all the times I cried in the bathroom. How her face tightened when I told her I liked her. How inferior I felt standing next to her fiancé. How she looked at him like I wasn’t even there at all.

 

Yet every time I get close to throwing her picture away, she’ll text again.

 

I miss you, pretty, she’ll say and send a new selfie. I hope you’re enjoying your new life.

+++

The ghost that followed my mom home wasn’t malevolent, but it liked attention. It tapped on the walls at her work when she stayed late with me, large knocks on the plaster, as if someone were stuck in there from the other side. It ran up and down corridors and through the hallways. It smelled like cigarette smoke. The scent would balloon out, linger, then move. I’d sit there alone at night and all of a sudden the scent would creep up, eerie as a cold night wind, slipping its arms around me.

 

The next year, I started staying home alone at night instead of going to work with Mom, and the sounds disappeared. The spirit went away.

 

“You didn’t hear from her?” I’d ask my mom, day after day.

 

“Nothing,” she said. “Must’ve gone home with somebody else.”

 

I thought about the ghost off and on, wondering where it went, but as I grew, my interests diverged outward, and I thought about it less and less. Other things began taking up my time—basketball, grades, friendships.

 

In the seventh grade, I fell in love for the first time. Gina was short with long hair and a crooked smile. She was also my biology teacher. I hung around with her after school every day, and she paid special attention to me. I thought it was because she loved me.

 

It wasn’t until later that I found out she had a sexual relationship with a boy only a year older than me. She was fired immediately and, in the following months, lied to me repeatedly, begging me to help her get her job back, telling me she loved me. She missed me, she said. She asked about school, about sports, like nothing bad had ever happened.

 

After months and months, I stopped emailing her back. It hurt to be in contact with her. I felt creepy and weird, and thought there was something wrong with me for loving someone who’d done something so bad.

 

Still, even after cutting off contact, I thought about her. My thoughts eventually became less about missing her, and more about trying to understand what she had done. Why had she done it? Why did she lie to me? Why did she pretend she cared?

 

That’s the part that haunted me. I thought she loved me like I loved her. But she never really did.

+++

After I finally stop talking to Lauren, I go on my first date in over a year. I walk downtown in a button-up shirt and skinny jeans, sweat pinching under my arms as a cool breeze snakes in through my shirt sleeves. I’m early, so I grab a beer across the street at a local gay bar and watch the crowd around the coffee shop across the street where I’m supposed to meet my date.

 

We’ve been talking for a few weeks now, and I really like her. She’s in her early forties, and a therapist. She communicates well and gives me space when I need it. I like her boundaries and her maturity. I like how she looks and what she does for a job and how giving she can be.

 

I spot her walking in and finish up my beer, then head over. She recognizes me immediately and opens her arms for a hug. We sit at a porcelain bar, and she orders a fancy coffee while I get a beer. We make small talk at first, then ease into a conversation. I try to keep my mind on the present and not the worries burbling in my stomach. Everything seems to go well. After two hours, she heads off to a dinner with her friends. I visit a friend, too, at a bar down the street, and we talk until it’s pitch black outside and the wind gets too cold for sitting outside anymore.

 

It’s on the walk back that I start to panic.

 

This woman is beautiful, successful, and healthy. What could she possibly want from me? I worry about what I said during our date, how I acted. I worry I’m going to end up liking her too much and then she is never going to like me back the same way.

 

After crawling into bed, I start to cry. The wind is strong and cold in a way I never expected Florida to be. I stay huddled in the blankets, my face pressed to the pillow.

 

I didn’t stop dating just because Lauren broke my heart. I stopped dating because it’s just too hard. I can’t like someone without immediately wondering how they will hurt me, like Lauren hurt me, and Gina. It’s been fifteen years now since she was fired, but she still pops up sometimes, slipping out somewhere from the shadows, this little voice telling me that she is going to leave. She is going to hurt you, like all the women you love. I don’t know how to shut it off or make it go away.

+++

After leaving Vermont, I spent five weeks on an “art farm” in rural Nebraska to work on my writing. There, I learned how to install drywall, build survival fires, and cohabitate with field mice. The house I lived in was more than a hundred years old and had been transplanted to Nebraska without its foundation, then built back up into something that could stand alone.

 

The bones of the house had potential. They were wood, weathered and old, but with moments of stark beauty. The house was slightly crooked, too, and with the additions that had been made on the western wall, it looked like it had a face—two eyes, a nose, and a zippered mouth.

 

When I first arrived, I was terribly uncomfortable in the house. There were too many people there, too much going on. But after it started getting cold, and everybody left, I transferred bedrooms and began liking the space much better.

 

I started noticing the phantom noises during the afternoons. I’d sit downstairs in the kitchen drinking tea and writing, and I’d hear footsteps above me. My roommates had work studios elsewhere, and I was alone. I’d call out. Listen to the silence. Then it would start up again. It went away when my roommates were there, but on several occasions when I was nestled in bed, I got the distinct feeling there was something else in the room with me, standing at the edge of my bed.

 

One night, I had a dream that I was a little boy away at a boarding school in Greece. I saw everything from his perspective—the cliffs above the sea, white foam crashing, the old school uniforms, the sunlight. I’d never had a dream from someone else’s perspective before. I told my roommates about it the next morning.

 

“Could’ve been a past life dream,” one of them said.

 

We all sat downstairs, sipping tea and coffee as the sun burned in through the windows. The smell of buttered toast hung in the air. “Or it could’ve been a memory from someone who died in here,” the other said.

 

I went about the remainder of my time in Nebraska believing there was a lonely child ghost in that house, just looking for a friend. I played music in the afternoons to cover up his stomping. Before I went to bed, I said goodnight to him. I told him to rest while we were all asleep.

 

Nebraska was where I stopped fearing ghosts. Nebraska was also where I unfriended Lauren on Facebook because I couldn’t stand to see any more of her wedding pictures. It was where I cried in my sleep, and dreamed about her, and tortured myself wondering what I had done wrong, what I could’ve done better to make her love me.

 

Most days, I woke up scared she would text me something about her new life with her new husband and I’d have to pretend, like I’d already done for a year, that everything was fine, and it didn’t tear me to shreds. Most nights, I went to bed afraid I would keep Lauren inside of me forever.

+++

A week after my date in St. Pete, I dream I’m living in a haunted house. It’s a large mansion with thinly made plywood on the outside, but with grandiose, Victorian-style decor on the inside. I go from room to room in the house with a feeling of dread at the back of my neck. I know something’s behind me, but I don’t want to turn around to look. The entire mansion is riddled with shadows, and I keep throwing open the curtains only to have them fall shut again when I move away.

 

Finally, I realize I have to go. I can’t stand it anymore. I pack up my car with all my things. I place some stuff on top of the car, twining rope around the door handles to keep everything in place. I hurry. I can feel the thing behind me, to the side of me, all around me.

 

After getting in the car and starting to drive away, my tension begins to ease. I look around at the trees. The pines hang low, their needles brushing the windshield as I drive.

 

Suddenly, the car engine sputters. I know then that the ghost is still with me, even though I’ve driven away. It’s hanging onto the car, trying to keep me from getting away. I fight with the stick shift, but the car slows. I’m driving downhill and hope the momentum will keep me going, but then I lose control of the steering. The car fishtails. I take a turn into some bushes and then for a second, it’s all green and moss and branches scraping at glass. At the end of the underbrush, my view clears. I’m at the edge of a cliff. Rocks kick up under the car. Panic grips my chest, but there’s nothing I can do. It’s too late.

 

I open my mouth to cry out and then I’m airborne, soaring over a hundred-foot fall, a rush of rapids waiting to devour me below.

+++

I wake up in the morning with that familiar feeling—that something else is in the room with me. It’s never happened in the St. Pete studio before, and the sensation is slightly different than it was in Nebraska. This morning, it’s more like this thing was with me and, as I woke, it slipped away.

 

I rise and make the bed. Shower. I bustle around in the tiny space, heating tea and stir-frying potatoes and eggs with onion and pepper. It’s cool out, and the sun peeks in through the blinds, falling in strips across the kitchen tile. I don’t have the sense of anything lingering anymore. It all faded as the sleep washed away from me.

 

My childhood was all about finding ghosts, about hunting them, and understanding them. I never learned how to get rid of them, though. It seemed like they were always just there, until they decided to go away, or I left wherever they were haunting. I want it to be like that with Lauren and Gina. I want to just wake up one day and they’ll both be gone from me.

 

That morning, I think a lot about my time in Nebraska. I think about how calm I was in that house, even knowing something else was there with me. I remember the cold mornings and the afternoons when the sun shined in, warming my cold feet. I remember turning the light off at night and looking at the outline of the room, my vision blurred without my glasses, dipping over rounded spots and shadows. “Good night,” I’d say to the room. “Rest now, so we can all get some sleep.”

Share

Analysis

At the diner, I sit with Freud

open on the table before me.

 

It’s rude to say clueless, but

clueless, the waiter won’t let

 

me sit with my book and coffee

half-filled. He brims it. Chimes,

 

A velociraptor stubbed its foot.

Pauses. Now it’s dino-sore.

 

I’m bored of Freud, it’s true,

but not bored enough to flirt

 

with you, I think, but don’t say.

Ha. Can I have my check?

 

which he brings with his number,

You’ll want to keep that receipt.

 

Freud on the sooty bus, I can

say that I have made many

 

beginnings and thrown out

many suggestions. The receipt

 

stuck between two pages,

bookmarking desire and lack.

Share

Father Tongue

Our embargo lifted its hands

off my eyes yanked my chin towards
the colorful architecture of your face

and left me alone with you, strange courier

of my DNA you, an almost-familiar place.
Hello, Cuba, hello father, may I call you that?

 

If a homeland offers no house or apartment,

if there is no familiar front door acting as a veil
between day in and day out,

if there is not enough monotony
from kissing the same faces goodbye,

 if every family has its scent
and I can smell ours

 

then I am still an outsider your hija Americana

sitting finally at your table

cradling a cup of coffee like an egg in my palm.
Do not speak directly towards me
Do not be silent let me bask in your accent—

 

my first words were pale, vast land and highway,
mouth dry with Tennessee cornbread, Mom’s
bleached wooden spoon stirred in shug-uhr

 but at school I liked the feel of Spanish

 in my mouth, en mi boca like ripe black-skinned sweet plantain,
 butter-soft and fried, r’s rolling in a hot pan of my saliva.

 

 Before you called me daughter, I had proof

 tuyo es mío I am not yours            but what’s yours is mine

Share

This is what it looks like, son,

so stop stabbing the heron’s belly,
as if repeated stabs will wake it from the flies.

 

I mean what I say,
when I talk of permanence like permafrost

 

or ancient arteries of the earth’s underbelly,
spilling from volcanic pores. A woman, did you hear?

 

Crated homing pigeons
and biked them to a Tokyo market,

 

when her tire hit a rut in the road
and the cage fell loose. Nine birds died on impact,

 

while her most treasured, still alive
but blinded by headlights,

 

hit a fender and blew open—
feathers falling like snow. For months,

 

the poor woman wore grief like a wet wool coat
and wept through the deadwind of winter. She’d set the table
each evening for two. Wait for the backdoor to swing

 

and shut
and the sulfuric smell of sorrow to come in the kitchen to eat.

 

Tristessa, she’d whisper,
and the ghostly girl locked behind thick black bangs
would look to her left and say nothing.

 

—

 

When I was a boy
I had a habit of carelessly sloughing bark
from a Eucalyptus. I loved its salve and

 

layered it like glue
over every burn left by my father’s lighter.

 

And though that tree numbed each wound,
resulting in an able-bodied boy, one who’d go on
to live like most other boys,

 

I carried with me two things:
scars without witness and the tree’s sick tinder.

 

Many moons chafed into years of dissolution
and worms hollowed its core. Violent winds blew.
The old tree tilted, fell loose from soil, then split in half.

 

For months, it ghosted an aroma so thick
the fallow fields became places to pray, rub wounds
and feel cleansed. I felt cleansed. Opened my mouth

 

and ran nude in the rain. Its fading ointment
coating my throat and my tongue.

 

—

 

Which leads me here with you, son.

 

This heron, no different
than the three dozen floating out over the estuary,
was once a winged creature maneuvering winds

 

with precision. It was effortless. Swooping
soft beach for sand dabs then arrowing back toward light.

 

It’s sick, I know, how Man manipulates beauty.
But listen, son, listen: I’m asking you
to set the weapon down and look toward ocean.

 

That storm coming close
is big enough to rip this beach from coastline and swallow it.

 

High tide will swell and splash over the barriers
built to guard the street. Perch will fill medians like manna.

 

The poor will come collect their rations.

Wave hands toward thunder and praise it.

 

I’m asking whether you’d like to keep gazing at records of lost time,
or undress and wade these choppy waters,
our bodies weightless as breath.

Share

Empty Suitcases

Inside Oma’s farmhouse it was as if panicked thieves had found everyday objects instead of treasure: closets, cupboards, the antique sideboard emptied into piles and strewn across the floors. “Kinkerlitzchen just gets broken, or stolen to fill up suitcases,” my grandmother always said about knick-knacks. But when questioned about the suitcases, Oma had refused to elaborate. “Enkelin, be glad that we are here and together,” she’d say to me, using her native tongue for granddaughter.

 

“Oma, what’s going on?” I asked.

 

She shook her head and urged me to the attic ladder, which she had managed to pull down, probably by standing on the stepladder she had used to clear off the top pantry shelves.

 

“You will look for my mutter’s trunk?” Oma said.

 

I’d never been in Oma’s attic. The dark entrance conjured up images of spiders, bats, and rotten floorboards with rusty nails. “What do you need so badly? Did you ask my dad if he could get it?”

 

“Your father is a good boy, but tender. You are different, like me but much smarter. We can take in these things and they do not destroy us.”

 

“Destroy us?”

 

“Please, Mäuschen, Oma will not always be here, and it sits like a big stone on my chest.” She crossed her hands over her heart.

 

I took a deep breath, climbed the ladder, flipped the light switch. In the attic: boxes, insulation, cobwebs, and a black steamer trunk. A plank served as a bridge to the trunk. When I lifted a yellowed wedding dress out of the trunk, tiny moths erupted in a flutter. A tin box contained old photographs, letters, and documents, written in German. I recognized Oma’s face in the sepia photo of a curly-blonde girl with her parents and a small boy. Did Oma have a brother?

 

I carried the box to the entrance and yelled down to see if this was it. Oma was sitting on the stepladder, talking to herself. “Oma!”

 

“Christina! You frightened me!”

 

“I found the box. With photos and papers. I’m coming down.”

 

“No, not the box. I mean, you keep the box. What else?”

 

“An old wedding dress.”

 

“We must find it. Go look harder,” she said.

 

“It would help if you told me what to look for.”

 

“Ja. That’s right.” Oma scrunched her face in scorn, spit out the words. “A fancy porcelain mantel clock.”

 

—

 

Oma hustled the clock into the kitchen like she held a blanket infected with smallpox.

 

I washed off my face in the sink, while my grandmother stared at the clock. I picked it up, checked for a maker’s mark. “A Limoges. It’s exquisite.”

 

Oma started crying, her shoulders rolling like turbulent ocean waves. “You know how my parents, a simple tailor and his wife, came by this clock?”

 

“No?”

 

“Sit, I will tell you.”

 

“The foolish Nazis thought things could be made right for the German people by compensating them for the losses they incurred during the war. One day, my papa and mutter went to an immense warehouse filled with furniture, dishes, candlesticks, rugs, Kinkerlitzchen. Papa wanted nothing— it would not bring little Frederick back—but Mutter wanted compensation. They’d lost everything—reduced to rubble. Why should they not take what the Jews left behind, Mutter said. The soldiers glared at Papa. He said, ‘Go then, Hedy, take what will make this better for you.’ The clock appeared on our mantel, without discussion, as if by elves. But, your Oma knew it was tainted. When my mutter passed, I packed it away.” Oma placed her hands upon mine. “The Jews did not willingly leave those things behind, Christina.”

 

“I know.” Oma had always claimed that her family left Germany before the war. Now I was afraid to hear that we were Nazis. Something else troubled me. “Did you go to the warehouse?”

 

She shook her head without conviction and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

 

“But if your parents never talked about it, how do you know all those details?”

 

“Is this an interrogation?” Oma abruptly rose. “What is it you want from me?”

 

She rushed to the sink then slammed dirty dishes around, muttering in German. Finally, she inhaled, and her shoulders fell.

 

“You were there,” I said.

 

She nodded but stared out the window. “Mutter stayed in bed, always crying. We could not refuse them.”

 

“The Nazis?”

 

“The soldiers were laughing, carrying on, undressing me with their eyes. Papa stood there, useless. He had slinked through the war while our neighbors disappeared. ‘Go on,’ he said to me. Past the bedroom sets, the pots and pans, the necklaces, the toys. I thought of little Frederick playing with his train and I became so … angry.” She faced me. “Then I saw it.”

 

“The clock?”

 

“Ja. So beautiful. Pink roses. Gold trim. A couple on a picnic, in love. I took a suitcase, from a pile that reached the ceiling, and put the clock inside.” Oma sighed. “I am a bad person.”

 

Yes. No, I thought. We weren’t who I’d thought we were.

 

She shuffled over, stroked my hair. “This is my big stone.”

 

It felt like my stone now, too. “We should sell it.”

 

“The clock does not belong to us.”

 

The clock was probably worth one year’s tuition.

 

Oma said, “We will return it to the family. This is your job, Mäuschen.”

 

The clock sat there, glinting in the warm light cast by the setting sun outside Oma’s kitchen window. Oma’s breaths were labored in a way I had not noticed before. A squirrel chattered upon the feeder my grandfather had built beneath an ancient maple tree. I wanted thunder and lightning to tear through the sky, a torrential rainfall to pound upon the steel roof, a tornado to whirl in the near-distance. Instead, a gentle wind simply rustled through the leaves of that tree as if the suitcases had never been emptied.

Share

Strawberries

Let us pretend there is no mystery in strawberries,
that we know precisely what floods the flesh so enticingly red,
coloring summer with a crimson flush, a violent bloom
amid the cool earth greens.
Let us knowingly say the unabashed hue comes
from ripeness for eating, and there is no more meaning
to the deep red so like our hidden internalities,
which we feign ignorance of while complacently stroking
the shield of our outer flesh.
Let us declare the finger-stains of picking are superficial,
and are washed away when our hands are clean;
that the strawberry juice has not already penetrated below the dermis
so that our own blood runs redder,
intoxicated and giddy with the inbred sugar of fruit;
let us feign that we see no connection
in the perfect way a single strawberry nestles in the human mouth,
to bring memories of feeding lovers and butter light,
romances that never were, and cool saucers in the evening.
And lastly, let us make believe
while the fields are still heavy with the lush season of ripeness
that the bruises on the tender skin do not hurt us, too,
that we don’t notice time playing decay on that succulent red.
Let us insist to ourselves, assuredly, continuously,
that our own hearts are not already burst
as the short-lived strawberry loses its firmness on the earth.

Share

Delivery

All year I avoided the square where Sam got knocked down. But that winter I found myself making pilgrimages to the shrine someone made up. The ghost bike was painted white and chained to a pole.

 

It was the winter I started to start early. I got pretty good at riding drunk. Pavement glittered and winked at me, sick with black ice. I ate sweet exhaust, crushed dinosaur bones. Nothing could touch me on these salt roads. Grit and ice clung to my face. I looked like any street I was rolling on.

 

One day under that carbon atmosphere I finished a delivery—five stars, no tip—and went to Sam’s bike. I was feeling good. Earlier I got IDed at Liquor Planet though it was my third time there today. It made me feel faceless.

 

There used to be a sign and there used to be flowers, but the world had a way of taking things away. These days, people were always leaving trash on Sam’s shrine. Sam would have found it funny—people littering on the shrine memorializing where he was run over by a garbage truck. He loved all the weird little circles of the world. But it made me sick.

 

There was no litter on his ghost bike that day. But there was a young man in the saddle. He looked familiar. Sam, I thought, but of course it wasn’t. The young man wore a vintage army jacket and pretended to peddle while someone filmed.

 

I rolled the red light. A cab stopped short, horn blaring.

 

“Look, I’m Lance Armstrong,” the man in the vintage army jacket said, laughing with his friends.

 

Even I barely saw me coming. I hauled him off Sam’s bike, and we fell into the black crust of gutter snow. An elbow filled my mouth with the hot taste of copper. I was punching anything I could lay hands on. A blow to the helmet, felt it crack. Stars and little birds flying around. It was all happening so fast, and then it was over.

 

Armstrong’s friends peeled me off him. They pushed me away, calling me an asshole, calling me a drunk, calling me a psychopath, calling out “WorldStar.” My head echoed. I couldn’t think of anything to call them back.

 

“We should call the cops,” one said, stammering. He dropped his phone as he took it out of his pocket. “Bet he escaped from the mental hospital.”

 

“Or the zoo,” another guy said. He frantically rubbed white sneakers. Blood was streaking.

 

“That’s not what tonight is about,” Armstrong said. “Goddammit. We’re supposed to be getting trashed, not cleaning up the city. Let’s get out of here.”

 

I shucked off the bloody tube scarf and watched them go, shaking. That’s when it clicked—Armstrong was a regular, one of the college guys that always got Chipotle delivered to the row of old brick houses on Seminary Hill.

 

I stomped around Sam’s bike, feeling deflated. I felt I had to explain myself, explain how the world was. But he knew. Probably better than me. I adjusted how the bike leaned against the pole. Tried to make it seem like a real memorial, not one more abandoned thing in a city full of them. There were several ghost bikes around town, appearing overnight after a messenger was killed. I didn’t notice them until I started riding. Then I started seeing them everywhere.

 

The old-school messengers said there was a ghost bike for everyone.

 

I rolled around, but I couldn’t bring myself to take another delivery. I couldn’t show up at a customer’s door with a mouth full of blood.

 

The cold wind blew through me. Winter was a preservative. I went back to Liquor Planet. I asked if they had free refills. Big laugh, small shake of the head. Five stars, no tip, I was thinking.

 

—

 

Stuck on standby. Algorithmic detention for not accepting enough deliveries the day before. I held a white van and let it move me through the falling light. Cars were honking to each other, saying hello, swapping stories. I was the car whisperer, I knew. The van slowed. I let go, filtering through traffic. I hoped someone would hit me so I could get up swinging. I thought about the time Sam U-locked someone’s mirror after they almost doored him. I laughed and my chest hurt. Like someone U-locked my ribs.

 

I had nowhere else to go so I went to the plaza where messengers drank away standby. When I arrived, messengers were doing track stands, motionless on their bikes.

 

A messenger tilted wildly and a yell rose from the crowd. The messenger recovered, but soon overbalanced. Maria was the last one upright. She sat easy in the saddle.

 

“Did we start yet? I could do this all night,” Maria said, shielding her eyes as she caught sight of me. “And out of the dusk, a challenger.”

 

My hands were trembling, from cold or something else entirely. I shook my head and leaned my bike against a tree bundled against the winter.

 

“Nah, my man’s too old,” a messenger said.

 

“You’ve never ridden a penny-farthing,” Maria said.

 

I sat on a cold bench. The plaza overlooked a brown field where yellow machines ate the city. The sun was between buildings. Maria rolled over, held out a beer.

 

“You used to come around more. Now when you show, it’s like you’re someplace else,” she said.

 

Maria was the closest thing I had to a friend among messengers, now that Sam was gone. Like me, she was older than most other messengers in the plaza. Unlike me, she worked for the courier collective—not an algorithm. The radio strapped to her shoulder crackled as if it heard me thinking about how she got regular hours. She leaned her bike against mine, sat beside.

 

“How long are you on standby for?”

 

“They change the rules every day,” I said, shrugged. “Could be all night, could be five minutes.”

 

“You should come to the office tonight after delivery hours are over. I’ll put in a good word for you. Turnover is so high, nobody remembers why they fired you. You can drop the foodie gigs for real shifts.”

 

“I can’t take Sam’s old job,” I said.

 

“It’s not,” Maria said. “It was Greta’s, then Ulysses’s. And they both left, same as everyone. Look around. It’s all new faces all the time. They’re not long for it anyway. Not like us dinosaurs.”

 

“The dinosaurs weren’t long for it either,” I said.

 

Below, machines with tires the size of people moved earth around. It was hard to wrap my head around the scale of it all.

 

“What about you,” I said. “When are you leaving?”

 

“I’ll never leave. Those trucks will have to pave me over,” Maria said.

 

When I laughed she tossed me the beer. It twisted in the air, and I had to catch it.

 

Another messenger clicked over the brick plaza. She asked Maria if she was signing up for the race this weekend, and handed over a clipboard. Maria signed her name and passed it to me. I looked at the names, recognizing only a handful.

 

“I’m rusty,” I said and shook my head.

 

“Steel is real,” Maria said. She patted her bike frame.

 

A light snow was beginning to fall. I thought about telling her about Sam’s bike, the drunks, the guy in the vintage army jacket. But I didn’t want to drag her down with me. I was only just keeping above water myself.

 

—

 

My phone woke me. I was off standby. Back online. Jacking in, I thought. The app promised a bonus if I completed ten deliveries during the blizzard. I unlocked my apartment door and walked through the dark basement. The world was a void beyond the glass lobby door. I didn’t know the storm was approaching, and now it was here. I never checked the weather. Whatever happens happens, I figured. I stowed a fifth in my jacket, rolled airplane bottles into my socks, feeling like an operator suiting up.

 

Outside, snow whispered against snow. The wind gusted up, the snow rushing like someone shook the world. But it always settled. I felt I was cycling through empty rooms. There was no sound beside the low crush of tires against the piste of the road.

 

There were bikes left out in the blizzard. Now every bike was a ghost bike. Every house and streetlight was its ghost, too. You only really knew a place when you saw ghosts everywhere.

 

A snowplow emerged from behind a snowbank. I stopped short, skidding. The wall of air hit me and held me. The pan of its yellow lights splashed across the white world. Salt leaped down the hill after it.

 

I brought coffee to a snowbound office. “Cold out there, huh?” the man said as I brushed snow out of jacket creases. Five stars, no tip.

 

Each delivery was a window into a life being lived. Doors opened and showed me a sliver of a world that I knew nothing about. Once, I had an order for a bunch of balloons. When I tied them to my handlebars, I pictured them pulling me into the sky.

 

The cold bit the tip of my nose. Wind like knives through my jacket. I had my lights on but could only see a few feet ahead.

 

I grinded through the morning. Before long, I only needed one more drop before I made the bonus. The slush, salt, and sand alchemized into a thick paste. I had to kick my tires free.

 

Eventually they seized entirely. I locked my bike to a pole. Figured I’d walk.

 

Then I remembered Sam’s ghost bike. It wasn’t far. The big, meat-eating tires, the heavy frame only a little twisted from the collision. When he built it, he wanted to make sure he could go anywhere. He wouldn’t mind, I told myself.

 

At the square where Sam died, I picked some garbage out of the front rack. I brushed snow off the seat. The cheap cable lock was brittle with cold, snapped without a fight. I promised Sam a real chain when I was done.

 

I cranked through the storm, slush rooster-tailing behind me. It snowed like it was the end of the world. I felt good, leaning into skids and turns, falling into snowbanks. I finished the airplane bottles and spiked them into the ghost of a trashcan.

 

While I picked up the order at the restaurant, the customer messaged me. They asked if I could pick up Advil on the way to their place on the hill behind the university. Chipotle and ibuprofen. Breakfast of champions. They said they’d tip extra.

 

I wound through snowy streets and bridges over empty highways. People sculpted cars out of snowbanks. Beach chairs, cathode-ray televisions, sawhorses stood in empty spaces.

 

I fought up the hill. I leaned Sam’s bike against a snowbank, hiked over it to the brick triple-decker. When the door opened, I knew him immediately. He was wearing a sweatshirt, but it was Armstrong. The man in the vintage green army jacket.

 

I thought about going for his throat and wondered why he didn’t do the same. Didn’t he recognize me?

 

The tube scarf, I remembered.

 

“Morning,” he said, stepping into the threshold, winced, held his forehead.

 

His eyes were glassy, and there was a video game controller in his hand. Behind him was a living room that looked like the scene of a bombing. Cans of beer stood like soldiers on every surface, guarding against the world. It seemed familiar, didn’t seem worth it. Everyone was their own little tragedies. All standing on top each other and wearing a trench coat, walking around and trying to blend in. I handed over the delivery, turned to crunch back down the steps.

 

“Wait,” he said.

 

Here it comes, I thought.

 

“Oh, you got the ibuprofen. Thanks,” he said. He flashed me a smile and a thumbs up. “Had a few too many last night. You’re a lifesaver.”

 

I showed him a thumbs up with my thick glove.

 

I got on the ghost bike as the door crashed shut behind me. I looked around at the big snowy world and shivered. Five stars, no tip.

 

A plow went by, salting the land. It sounded like rain falling softly. The streets were empty, woolly with snow. The city seemed like it was under glass.

 

Maybe I had a shot at the race this weekend, I was thinking. None of the rookie messengers could ride like this in the snow.

 

I coasted down the hill. The plow turned a corner and the wind died down and the world was quiet. The falling snow streaked past, and I felt I was at the bridge of a spaceship, jumping to hyperspace.

Share

Thousands and Thousands of Thousand Oaks

When I’m watching the street fill up with leaves when dusk morphs
to a waxy flickering to a phone pinging dad I’m inside this bar
I’m line dancing I’m filled with holes for the man with the Glock
releasing the safety must be orgasmic and a background check
equals emasculate one day is like another and then it’s another
school café yoga studio church another concert hall another
outdoor space for cold bodies quiet like a pile of unlucky armadillos
when a friend arrived two days before the one at the synagogue
when he said I have a right to carry to sleep with it to fuck it
the pasta went from hearty to heart riot though I wanted to handshake
a civil understanding on the footprints leading to a glowworm cave
of mourners to the police officers’ eyes the line dance toward
the hearse that my pain string was taut that our country’s pain string
is taut that our country is electric like a frying pan with a frayed cord
always a fray away from fire

Share

Two Poems with Parents

Sleeping in My Childhood Bedroom as an Adult

Glow in the dark stars tumble

into black, their light hanging

 

like the feet

of a man tied to death. I trace

 

the outlines of memories and pull them

to my nose, they smell like

patchouli and my father’s

velvet coat. Gray shapes

 

dance to the window. Are they

the ghosts of my dead dogs

or the angels I overheard

my mother asking for help? Or maybe just

teenage headlights, sneaking back into their parents’

driveway. The laundry

room moans and shakes

 

behind a poster

of New York City’s face. The dryer thumps

against my wall. Round

round round. Clothes rise

and fall

like the air lifting up my chest. My mother’s

Elvis T-shirt. My father’s white

 

briefs. The noise goes

in circles. Up

and down. Taped on the fridge

is a photo dated two

days after my birth. My mother is holding

my head to her chest, my feet swing above

 

Elvis’s bleached teeth. And I still remember

my father

getting nervous and shouting

and shutting

 

the door when my brother and I found

him in his white briefs. Rise

and fall. I focus on the dark

and the noise and the clothes

that make the

dark warm. Up

 

and down.

Rise

and fall. Round

round round.

 

Sitting in a Classroom Where Everyone Is Smarter Than Me (Except Maybe That Guy with the Taco Tattoo)

I want to pull my knees to my chest

and make myself small and see

through like the balled-up sheets

of cling wrap I find in the drawers of my mother’s

kitchen. But I don’t do that

because I wouldn’t be small

or see through to the people

sitting across the table. They would still see

a girl with uncombed hair

wearing a baggy t-shirt she got free from a bank

because she never learned

how to not be ashamed

of her breasts. And they might find it strange

if this girl slipped her feet from

the mud-painted rainboots

that keep her weighted

to the government-bought linoleum,

and then if she pulled

her feet and the hand-knit socks

that held them up to the seat of her chair,

and what if her neck let go

so that her forehead sat balanced between

the tops of her knees.

Yes, that would look strange.

Instead I move my left thigh

over my right and tie my calves

into a knot. I can’t see

my legs beneath the table

but I imagine them as the twisted strings

of green and pink

taffy my father pulled from his suitcase

whenever he was afraid

that he’d been gone

for too long. Throw away

your wrappers, he told me. My mother yelled

when she found them

rolled into worlds

and tucked inside

the corners of kitchen drawers.

Share

Two Poems

Once when I was eight

and my sister seven, tensions boiled over

 in a game of hide & seek

& I slapped her. Thwack.

 Her head shook while streams on her cheek

loamed into deepening red.

 She didn’t talk to me for a week.

No chocolates, no sorry, no nothing.

 I even did her homework for a day. Still nothing.

She finally spoke when she found me

 crying in a corner after India had lost a cricket match.

Today, years later she isn’t picking up my calls

 & I’m here wondering if she’s busy

or simply pissed with me.

 I haven’t seen her in long & in this hour of prolonged dusk,

I’m trying to summon facts on her.

 But as I pace on my balcony, phone in hand,

watched by a sun rasping blood across a browning sky

 all I gather is the colour of her slapped cheek.

And how on reconciliation after a week, she had said

 I just wanted to see you cry.

 

Sambar on my shoes

I spot you in the cafeteria sitting with a faceless stranger

while I await my dosa at the desolate counter

you sip what seems like watermelon juice although

I’m sure my blood is just as gruesome and thick

that must be how your cheeks are so red and faint

like blushes of sky at dawn attracting birds of fury

and strangeness unknown I see some wrens beak you playfully

the crimson spreads through your neck like a field of clover

the stranger inundated with anticipation he crosses his legs

underneath the table when you let out a laugh

I head back to work my appetite punctured my spirit flensed

my dosa tray trembles in the tremors of discovery

buried fears don’t nibble they swallow

I try to tell myself it was probably someone else

but I find incriminating evidence when my colleague points out

continents of sambar on my white converse shoes

Share

Among Schoolchildren

Like a cormorant turning on the wind before tucking its wings and descending into the ocean, my mother, five days a week for forty years of her life, submerged herself in the primary schools of small-town Texas, each brick or stucco campus at which she worked named for a hero of the Alamo: Travis, Crocket, Bowie, and Bonham, garrisons of the alphabet and basic arithmetic—crumbling and underfunded missions all.

 

As the school’s lone counselor, my mother traveled from classroom to classroom, her materials piled on a Rubbermaid cart as if she were a vaudevillian or ventriloquist, boxes and suitcases filled with dolphin puppets, marionettes of creatures from the sea, and stuffed-animal pirates, each one with an accompanying picture book to teach children about difference and compassion.

 

Abandonment was the fear that trumped all others, and the children carried it always, the fear dissipating only at the sight of a father’s arrival, or spreading like a fever at the close of the school day when a mother was not readily seen.

 

How deeply the children sank into worry, withdrawing into hooded sweatshirts like miniature monks, or carving row upon row into their desktops with the tip of an inkless pen.

 

To be sure, the children had cause to worry.

 

Parents deployed to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and though most returned to the Air Force base on the city limit line, some did not: the brother ambushed in a sandstorm at night, a father’s helicopter losing sight of the ground, a mother’s Jeep triggering an IED.

 

There were the domestic and financial worries as well, and my mother scrounged shoes for the shoeless and glasses for the sightless, arranged pro bono visits from doctors, marriage counselors, custody advocates, and lawyers.

 

Each Friday, she filled backpacks with nonperishables for the poorest children to take home for the weekend, without which they would have nothing to eat, the great isolation of hunger, each child, not adrift for days, but helpless, inert, a boulder in a river around which all water flows.

 

For loneliness, consider the third grader born without cheekbones, a shrunken jaw, Treacher Collins syndrome, who met with my mother when a surgeon was found to perform a procedure in Dallas for free.

 

The recovery required that a helmet be worn for weeks to secure her features like clay dredged from a riverbed to dry in the sun. The young girl’s concern was not the surgery but the wearing of the helmet, conspicuous to all.

 

A deal was struck, and when the girl arrived back at the school, my mother was wearing a helmet as well. Other teachers and students joined in, and for two months all manner of headgear—whether bicycle, beanie, lacrosse, or hockey—bobbed through the halls.

 

Like Janus, the Roman god with counter-gazing faces, the god of new beginnings and transitions, the children relied at all times (naively, stubbornly, irrespective of evidence) on hope. Each six-week block, each promotion in grade, was a chance to start again, and if hope flickered and dimmed like a struck match, their final refuge was laughter.

 

When the vice-principal, svelte as an offensive tackle for the Houston Oilers, the muscles of her right forearm hard as an ox’s neck from swinging a hole-bored hickory paddle (in a time before spanking was banned from public schools), tucked her mohair skirt by accident into the rear of her floral-print underpants and inadvertently promenaded through the hall, the laughter, shrill and instantaneous as the city’s lone tornado siren, overwhelmed the vice-principal’s calls for order so that, red-faced, defeated, she was left with no choice but to skulk to her office and brood.

 

The pièce de résistance (French, spoken with a Texas accent, could peel paint from the Eiffel Tower itself, and for two semesters in high school an English teacher referenced the “Bore-gē-OH-ēs,” the word seared in my mind until, in a Marx Brothers movie, I heard Groucho correctly pronounce “bourgeois”) was the story my mother told about puberty education, how, on one day every school year, the fourth-grade boys were sent en masse to the cafetorium as the girls retired together to the gym.

 

Television stands with VCRs were wheeled down from the A/V closet, and for forty-five horrifying yet fascinating minutes, as the teachers popped in the tapes and slipped out for a smoke, the children suffered a barrage of gender-specific information from menstruation to dropping testicles, body hair to voice cracks.

 

On one such appointed day, my mother heard shrieking from the cafetorium and gym at once, and as she rose from her desk, a teacher ran through the hall, her just-lit cigarette trailing smoke from her undulating hand like a priest swinging incense.

 

“The tapes are switched!” the woman yelled. “The students are watching the wrong tapes!” as the vice-principal, gopher-like, peered out from behind her office door.

 

In the end, parents had to be called, and though no explanation would fully suffice, the secretary (who got stuck making the calls) offered only a shrug and a halfhearted, “They would have learned about it all sooner or later.”

 

The one indisputable truth about children is that they grow into adults where personality, instead of evolving, calcifies.

 

“Joey!  We taught you better than that!” my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, would exclaim and slap her hand down on the newspaper article she was reading when a now-adult student was apprehended for robbing a convenience store or absconding with a neighbor’s car.

 

For my mother, the adult was never severable from the child, which became the measure of her work. Student replaced student each year until, at last in retirement, the progression, like the volley of soldiers against the walls of the Alamo, subsided.

 

I shall never retreat, Lieutenant Colonel Travis wrote in his final hours.  Victory or Death—the scene reenacted each year in the spring while the teachers mouthed lines to the costumed martyrs, and their parents, knowledgeable of history and fleeting time, raised cameras and tripods like bugles and swords.

Share

No Problem, Mon: The Batty Boy Adolescent’s Quick Survival Guide

Become a Christian

There is no exception. When Grandma’s getting ready for church tomorrow, tug at her skirt hem and say Grandma, I want to come to church too. She’ll scowl. She’ll remind you that Big Reds said the same thing five years ago, but now he sleeps in every Sunday and had that seizure the other day from smoking weed. Stand your ground. Point out that you’re nothing like your brother, and that it’s her Christian duty to set you on the path of righteousness. She’ll smile. She’ll call you a mouthy little bitch.

 

Stick with it. Go to church every Sunday. Every Sunday. Starch your white shirt. Press neat creases into your wool slacks. Save any little money you have for the collection plate and cherish the pocket-sized New Testament she’d originally given to Big Reds. On the bus ride to town, ignore the other kids. Sit by your grandma and assume the stoicism of a proud martyr. This means no complaining about: the holes in the bus floor, the rents in the bus seats, the heat pressing in from all sides. Sweat will run into your eyes and pool beneath your butt. But Jesus endured much worse on the cross, so keep quiet.

 

Don’t Make Friends

Okay, this is a two-parter. So first off, don’t make friends with the kids at church. I know this is tempting; church is so damn boring (can you believe it? Jamaica in 1998, and part of Holy Trinity’s church service is still in Latin), and these kids, they’ll want you to catch butterflies with them at first, out back, in the churchyard, ’round where the tombstones are. It’s a trap. They’ll grow eventually (well, the girls you’ll witness — the boys will start to disappear around 13). They’ll grow somber, like those heavyset women in church with the lining of their slip always dipping below their skirt. They’ll start to wear blouses that button at the neck, and fasten their hair in no-nonsense plaits. They’ll start to invite you to summer retreats and choir practices and, when you politely decline, exhale gasps of frightened outrage that seem way too heavy for their flat chest. You’re not here for all that work. So just keep to yourself from the outset. Sit by your grandma and shake hands with the ladies and the old men as they walk by.

 

When your grandma dies (terrible loss, really), you can ditch that fancy church in Kingston and go to one in your own area. Don’t go to one in your direct neighborhood, though — go to one on the other side of the gully where the roads are less formal (snaking through bushes) and the houses have a delicious ad hoc quality to them — zinced and planked and set atop cinder blocks. Notice how the roof of this church is flat. Notice how the windows aren’t stained. Notice how the floor is dirty, how the walls are bare and how the pews aren’t pews but fold-up chairs. Notice how the women here jump and wail and mash their faces into foregone ecstasy. Notice how, no matter what church you go to, the preacher’s son is always tall and square-jawed and smiling at you in a way that makes you wonder if there’s anywhere Satan doesn’t have a house.

 

Speaking of your hometown, this brings us to part two of this section: don’t make friends with the other boys in your neighborhood. That’s asking for trouble. Eventually, they grow into teenagers and confront the futility of trying to make it anywhere. They never know their fathers, and they never make it past the tenth grade. They spend time under the lampposts, by the gully bank, against the old trailer, slapping dominoes, shooting dice, slipping their hands under their girlfriends’ skirts. They’ll want to pull you in on it too. Seal the bands of brotherhood. The Christian defense won’t work here. They’re too basic, too disaffected. My yute, you doh see di girl a check fi yuh? Why yaa act like a pussy?

 

Trust me. Way too risky. Best to stay inside at all times. Except when you have to go to school, of course. Your mother will send you to good schools in Kingston, far away from the locals. That’s good. After school, when you get off the town bus, head straight home. People will call to you. They’ll say Brown Boy or Scholar or Preacher. It will be out of deference. They’ll admire your discipline. Still, don’t call back to them. Nod politely or smile. Sometimes you can hold up a hand in acknowledgement. Carry around your bible for good measure too. They know you go to church, but it’s good to reinforce this every once in a while.

 

Keep up at your studies. Otherwise, you won’t have an excuse to stay indoors. Your mother will begin to think it unnatural that a boy is spending all his time in front of a television, atrophying his muscles, neutering his presence. Studying is an excellent pretext. It assures her you’re determined to make the best of her sacrifices. It buys you some good bonding time with her too. She’ll bring you milk sometimes, a whole glass. She’ll put her arms around you. She’ll say you’re nothing like your brother (Big Reds’ been disappearing for days at a time now) and squeeze a little harder. You’ll feel her lips on the top of your head. You’ll remember how soft they feel pressing against your skull. You’ll wonder when will be the last time she holds you like this.

 

Avoid All Types of Playing Fields

This might seem random, but it’s worth noting. Whether cricket or football or basketball, they’re all the same — trouble. This won’t be a problem where your schools are in Kingston; all the playing areas are walled off and/or privatized. In your hometown, though, they’re plentiful, cropping up in dubious makeshift forms in the most inconvenient places. Be vigilant. Keep abreast of the changes in landscape and avoid the main thoroughfares. Playing fields line them. I know it’s tempting to watch the boys at play, but you’ll thank me. What do you think will happen when a ball comes your way? Don’t think it won’t happen, ’cause it will. And those men, the ones you like to watch, will lean on their haunches and heave at the air, expecting you to throw it back. And, bless your heart, you’ll try, but your throw will go awry (your wrist — always a bit too theatrical). Or you’ll try to kick it back, concentrating with all your might on lining up the ball with the plate of your foot, but the ball sails wild. It goes clear over the light wires onto a rooftop or across the gully into the bushes — it will go everywhere but straight (Tee hee). The men will laugh. They’ll call you skettel, Shelly-Ann or Big Reds’ likkle sister. They’ll ask you what color panty you prefer. Even though it’s in good fun, it’ll hurt. You’ll develop an ironic fear of balls.

 

On your walks home, best to take the long way through the back roads. Through the flimsy dirt lanes webbing through the groves and wild grass that cordon the town. Buck up, though; you’ll make a friend. His name is Mr. Turner and he’s a sweet old man. Grey sideburns dip from his bald head and line his weirdly smooth face. But he has such nice brown eyes, bright balls of coppery brown eyes. He lives in one of those wobbly wood shacks that crop up by the back lanes like monstrous weeds.

 

He’ll call you over one day and offer you butterscotch. You’ll notice his house is not as ugly as the others; it’s a confident little wood square set atop slabs of concrete. And, look, he has a little garden to one side — bright bunches of cherry bougainvilleas dripping from a trellis of a fence. He’ll be sitting in a small wicker chair behind his front grill, the inside of his house dark behind him.  He’ll tell you how you look like his grandson, who’s also about seven, and offer you butterscotch candy in a yellow-gold wrapper. You’ll start taking that lane regularly; you’ll tell him about your day at school in exchange for candy. When you get a little older, he’ll start giving you plantain tarts and little patties he baked himself; he’ll tell you about the daughter he hasn’t seen since his divorce thirty-odd years ago. She’s about forty now and has a son whom he’s only seen in a few pictures she’s sent. You look so much like his grandson, he’ll say; he’s probably growing a beard too. You’re curious; you didn’t even realize you were growing a beard. Come here, he’ll say, you’re growing some fine little hairs. He’ll reach his hand through the grill and you’ll move close. He’ll sweep the line of your jaw with a shaking finger. Are those really baby hairs? you wonder. Or is his hand that coarse?

 

When you go back the next day, he won’t have any patties for you. His spatula fell behind the stove and his hands are too big to reach back there. Do you think you could reach back there and get it for him? He’ll ask to see your hand. He won’t be smiling. Still you consent, and he’ll grab your wrist with a strength you didn’t know he had. Will you come and help me? he’ll say. His grip is hard, but his face is as still as dead water. You nod, holding his eyes with yours. He tightens his grip; his eyes are balls of thunder in the dark. Yes, you say again, and tick your mouth into smile. When he lets go to open the grill, run! Dart straight through the fever grass — tall, sticky fever grass slapping your wrists and scratching your neck.  Cut into the burned-out clearing, then dash through the field of wild bush they call Deadman’s Fall. Jump the gully. Keep running. Keep running. Run until you reach the guinep tree at the top of the hill that overlooks the Fall. Take a breath. Drop your book bag and take a breath. Laugh, boy, laugh. Throw your teeth to the sky and laugh.

 

You’re such a tease, you’ll think to yourself. You’re such a motherfuckin’ tease.

 

Make Up a Girlfriend

Yes, that’s right. When you’re in high school, you’ll want to make up a girlfriend. Your classmates are from a different type of environment from yours. Their houses have carports, and they use summer as a verb. Thankfully, they’ll have some amount of decorum. They’ll not expect you to share sex stories, as they know you can quote Ephesians. Still, being Christian doesn’t exempt you from having a girlfriend. It’s convenient to make one up. So here goes: Her name is Rachel. She goes to your church in your hometown, and her favorite show is Step by Step. If they ask why you never bring her to one of the formals, just say that Kingston frightens her. They’ll believe you.

 

Be sure to have more interesting tidbits about Rachel so that she sounds like a human being. Keep cryptic notes on the inside cover of Wuthering Heights at home. Things like: R was born on May 6, 1988. R likes pink hibiscuses. R does not get the appeal of video games but has a brother who plays constantly so doesn’t mind it so much. In the unlikely event that your older brother (he’ll be back from jail around now) finds these notes on the inside cover of your book, tell him they are notes you’ve made on the novel’s protagonist, Romeo. He’ll believe you.

 

Near Final Note

All this work is wearying I know, but think, an American college is right around the corner. And I swear to you, there, you will have reached the promise land. There are, of course, practical matters of concern — Where do you do SATs in Jamaica? — Where are the American college applications? — What is your story? And how do you craft that into a compelling narrative? — Do foreigners qualify for need-based aid? What’s your mother’s salary like in US currency?

 

Daunting? No doubt. But now that the exit is so close you get to indulge in a bit of fantasy as a reward. Actually, it will be a good form of motivation. That’s right! You can finally start to imagine what type of boyfriend you’re going to have. Can you believe it!? B.O.Y.F.R.I.E.N.D.

 

Okay, so let’s see, he’s going to be your roommate — tall, broad shouldered, athletic build but not too hard. Blond hair, parted bangs and a baby face with a smile so earnest you’ll be convinced he still drinks milk with dinner. Hey! He’ll look just like James Van Der Beek. Yes! And he’ll wear flannel, and be from some outside-sounding place like Montana. He’d have played football in high school and, like you, had to work very hard to bury his difference. You’ll realize he likes it when you mistake American football terms. He doesn’t get to correct you often, so you give him this opportunity. “Oh my god, it’s end zone not field zone!” He’ll find this ignorance charming, and sometimes chuck you on the shoulder. He likes your accent too. You’ll sometimes catch him mouthing a word you’d just said, slightly in awe. And that is how it will happen, in the dark of your dorm room one night. You’ll both be sitting up in his bed against the wall, your head rested on his shoulder, his arms scooped around your back. It doesn’t matter how you got there, just know you’ll both be slightly drunk. He wants to know how you say ‘hello’ in Jamaican. Hello. And now he wants to know how to say ‘what’s up.’ Whaa gwaan. Whaa gwaan…he’ll contemplate it in a heavy whisper, gently rubbing the curve of your side. Your hand is now across the barrel of his chest, and you’ll marvel at the contained force of his heat. And even more, you’ll marvel at the exquisite realization that you’ve finally found your first friend.

 

The Return Home

So this is where I take my leave (for further tips on navigating the complex identity issues related to race and alienation within the American queer scene, please see Yes I Lacan: Dislodging the Pane of the White Gays”). But before I go, just a word about your return trip to Jamaica: don’t bother with the coming out thing. This trip won’t be about you. Plus, your mom will be in a weird space with Big Reds’ death and all. She’ll look different when you see her, inching instead of walking, and her eyes will have sunken in. There’s something unmoored about her — this wild hair and rumpled skin. Was your mother always this ugly?

 

There’ll be no words between you. She’ll squeeze your wrist and turn to the cab then stay silent on her side of the back seat. Her hair used to be sleek and jet black, and her nails were always polished in a ripened pink like the insides of a guava. But her hands look cracked and dead now. You’ll think to take one of hers into yours, but what kind of a gesture is that after 15 years? No, better to think about the flurry of e-mails Big Reds had been sending you, the ones that would be irritants before his disappearance and a torment after: Hey bro, how are you?; hey bro, do you think you could help me with something?; I promise I’ll pay you back; How’s teaching going?; Please, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t serious; Hope you’re well, bro; Let me know when we can talk. Consider that he probably begged your mom for help too. Ponder the possibility that she ignored them as well.

 

As the cab turns out of the airport and onto the Palisadoes, it will hit you like a brick of cold that it happened here, somewhere in the crevices of this wiry road snaking through the ocean. Or maybe they didn’t do it here. Maybe they chopped your brother up elsewhere, loaded the parts in the trunk of his car and left it at the lip of the airport in a whip of theatrical irony. Well, that’s assuming Big Reds was trying to get away from something. And that’s assuming “they” knew what irony is anyway. Oh dear, look at you, trying to construct a narrative.

 

Look out at the city, across the maw of dark water to the clump of small buildings huddled by the waterfront. This is Kingston. There’re more buildings, you’ll remark.

 

Yeah, the Chinese, she’ll say.

 

When you move to hold her hand, she’ll stare back at you from the plane of another world.

 

Mum, how did this happen?

 

How you expect me to answer that, son?

 

Simple. Just tell me what you know.

 

Her mouth too looks old, limp in a mesh of wrinkles.

 

I don’t know what. Maybe it’s the IMF.

 

The IMF killed Big Reds?

 

She’ll shake her head, raking the air with the teeth of her tin-gray hair, and you’ll remember, you’ll remember, she had grown ugly right in front of you. She’ll be saying something about the murder rate and the state of emergency, but you’re trying to remember your mother as a pretty woman, when she used to kiss you on the head and her hair would fan about you like a sheet. Why did she stop doing that? Maybe it’s because you stiffened when she started growing ugly. When was that? Maybe when grandma died. All her powders and creams had disappeared around then. Or maybe it was around high school; there was talk about her hairdresser money going to your monthly lab fees.

 

She’ll be talking about some riots. Do you remember the riots after the Free Zone got shut down? You won’t remember any riots. You’re trying to remember your mother’s hands, the way you witnessed them putrefy because of the clothes washing she started doing on the weekends. Whose clothes were they? It hadn’t concerned you to ask. But the money you remember going to Big Reds’ first bail because of…the riots?

 

Was Big Reds in the riots?

 

She’ll look at you, concerned.

 

No baby, Big Reds wasn’t in the riots. He’d already moved to MoBay, trying to find another job. Remember?

 

Why can’t I remember any of this? You’ll ask.

 

Maybe you were focused on the wrong things, she’ll say.

Share

Wedding Season

Free again, my panther

life takes off fast—palmettos

and snakes in the path.

The beautiful sea grape

is aging like it’s winter;

leaves of talkative platters,

some big as my hand, still

grow heart-red veins

 

but have gone soft

and pale at the edges.

My very last husband

sheds his brave persona

and slithers into the bamboo

for good. Leaving

 

him there, I remember

that on nights like this,

thousands of baby

sea turtles hatch

and make their determined

way to the water. Life

goes on, the planet sings,

unaware of all our betrayals.

The waves swell

and collapse. I hear

 

the corks and lantern-lit

shouts of new wedding

feasts all over this ringing

world. If champagne comes

in midnight blue, I’ll toast

their tight bouquets of joy

as clouds bubble

against the sky in

their incessant kissing

with the moon.

Glowing sand pushes

up from every step

like sifted white

hills of cake flour,

the only light for miles.

 

 

Please also see Russ Kesler’s review of Susan Lilley’s book Venus in Retrograde, in which this poem later appeared.

Share

Salvaging Beauty

(for Alan)

 

Peonies are blooming

to the point of collapse.

They lean into each other

with nothing to say.

Gracing lawn and stones,

thousands of fragrant petals,

extravagant as wings

relinquished.

 

To make final bouquets, I take

every flower that does not dissolve

at touch—late blooms, buds

surrounding first display—

pinks, bold and blushed;

shameless yellow;

white, center-stained

with crimson.

 

Every vase chipped

or cracked I fill;

vases on every table

in the house. I leave

the lawn scattered

with petals and stems.

I wait for the scent

of this dying

beauty.

 

Share

Natural Order

I’m a little more prairie than you, Mom.
Grew up a stone’s throw from winding,

 

forested trails. Trees arched over gravel
roads, and the place in the powder sky

 

where their branches met, a cathedral ceiling.
You buried downed birds in shallow graves,

 

in a vacant lot by your apartment. I watched

a whole deer decompose in a field. Made a school

 

project of her. Every quarter, on my class trip

to buckthorn country, to the task of weeding-out

 

invasive plant species, I saw the same doe
sink deeper into the ground. Drew her outline

 

on a worksheet more and more skeletal
with each visit to her muddy bedside. Mom,

 

you too have watched the seasons change.
Your childhood rotted into caretaking,

 

like a sun-bleached cordgrass giving
its whole self back to the ground.

 

When you were seven, you started buying
the family’s groceries each week—

 

cans of beans stacked in a bike basket,
cradled by cornstarch and white flour.

 

In elementary school, all my teachers
had the same four-pronged chart

 

of the seasons: spring turned
summer, then a gentle decline

 

into fall and a snowman

smiling through winter.

 

Nothing in nature actually follows

this pattern. A field mouse breeds

 

too many young, swallows
half of them back into herself.

Share

When God Is a Woman

How many householders meet in

a whorehouse?

 

How many mujras dwell in a kotha?

 

How many neonates hew to a bordello?

 

Like her admirers

the god is silent.

In her sinews

hides a hint of soil

from the yard of courtesans.

Share

Monads and the Cosmic Jigsaw Factory

My scientist friend—his name’s Adam but he spells it “Atom”— calls me about the latest breakthrough. He says physicists have discovered a new subatomic particle. His voice is urgent, almost cracking.

 

I say, “I’m tired of spheres. Tell me this new particle is noodle-shaped.”

 

He says, “Monads, they’re called monads. They don’t have a shape, but they might have a soul.”

 

I’m no conspiracy theorist. Still, sometimes I get the suspicion that the scientific community is really a secret society of comedians who get a kick—a 2,500 year-old kick—out of human credulity.

 

Atom is out of breath. He says he has to go, but he’ll keep me updated. He makes it sound like he’s right there, in the midst of the action, his hands touching the lever of a particle accelerator, his eyes obscured by fancy goggles. I use the word “scientist” somewhat liberally. Atom teaches AP Physics at a charter school.

*

When my wife and I were still doing marriage counseling (a year before our divorce), Atom was full of suggestions. He kept championing the need for proximity. He’d call me up and say, “Are you close? I mean, you know, close?” He’d suggest that my wife and I take a sample of each other’s blood and put the samples under a compound microscope, and then—as husband and wife—spend time marveling at the shifting landscape within, how each drop of our blood was a unique eruption of lentil-shaped lava.

 

On some level, I think he was right. My wife and I were failing because we had run out of topography.

*

The next day, Atom calls up again. This time, I stop him mid-sentence and say, “Soul? I think I misheard you yesterday—did you say monads have souls?”

 

He says, “It’s complicated. At the very least, monads have perception. Not to mention appetite—”

 

“Jesus, they get hungry?”

 

“More like inclination. Or desire. They long.”

 

There’s a lull on the phone. On Atom’s end of the receiver, I can hear clinking glasses and a droning electronic voice, as if Atom’s at happy hour with Stephen Hawking.

 

I say, “Look, it just doesn’t sound very, uh, scientific—”

 

“What?”

 

“All these metaphors.”

 

“Actually, at the subatomic level, nonidentity is the norm. Nothing is what it seems, and thus metaphors are the most accurate form of language we physicists have at our disposal—”

 

Atom’s voice is drowned out by cheering, even wild abandon. Wherever he is, it sounds like a team has just scored.

 

I say, “So, uh, what do they want?”

 

Atom says, “Who?”

 

“Monads.”

 

“Omniscience.”

*

To be fair, it’s not just Atom who’s monad-struck. All the media outlets—NPR, CNN, FOX, even ESPN—can’t get enough. Monads this, monads that. Despite being infinitesimal, monads are bigger than sliced bread. The title of one article reads, “Sentient Particle Added to Our Subatomic Zoo!” Oddly, it’s not the first time I’ve heard the whole zoo analogy. After my wife and I split, Atom wouldn’t shut up about quarks and leptons and gluons and all those other subatomic “animals” that escaped from the primordial zoo.

 

Atom said, “The Big Bang was the first prison break.”

 

I said, “You’re mixing your metaphors.”

 

He said, “Imagine how many inmates we’ve yet to tag.”

 

It dawned on me later that Atom was talking about women. Other women. Soul-bonding with particles that were not my wife.

*

Atom keeps calling. Sometimes I wonder if I’m Atom’s only friend. He strikes me as the kind of person who believes friendship is monogamous.

 

He says, “The perception of monads is directed inward, not outward.”

 

I say, “Omniscience—I don’t understand—how does a particle seek omniscience?”

 

“Monads are navel-gazers. Each monad is like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle: its own existence belies the contours of its neighbors. Thus in studying its own being, each monad is in fact intuiting its cosmic neighborhood.”

 

Atom goes on to describe how monads understand the world concentrically. Monads reason from self to neighborhood to neighborhood’s neighborhood, etcetera.

 

It all sounds a bit alarming. Like an invasion. Minus the green humanoids with laser beams.

*

I rub my eyes into the wee hours of the night. Everything is out of focus except negative space. A hat suggests a head. An outlet, a plug. Contours become clues. I imagine my body as one gangly, oversized monad: it too is a jigsaw piece with a shape that suggests a connection. What connection? I only know the answers that are incorrect. All the hands I thought my hands fit into.

 

You get this sinking feeling when you turn forty—alone forty, divorced forty, table-for-one forty—you get this sinking feeling that the cosmic jigsaw factory made a mistake. A manufacturing error. Honestly, I think Atom knows this feeling all too well. I think it’s why he won’t stop calling. The cosmic jigsaw factory expresses its deepest apologies. No one’s perfect, it says. But the truth is, well, how to put it? Your piece was shrink-wrapped in the wrong box.

Share

Rich Gold

Aquifer shares this story in conjunction with
Anna Levi’s visit to UCF on February 4, 2019, 7:30 p.m.,
Foxtail Coffee at the UCF Bookstore.
Please also see our interview with Levi.

 

This evening when I woke up, Chino was gone. Not a sight of him selling crack on Cow Head Road. There was something different about that morning. The rain came with rage in a vengeful way for the first time in two months. Force-ripe baby breadfruits dropped into the canals whenever the wind struck. Bedsheets slid off the lines straight into the muddy gutter. Some girls were woken up by the growls of the thunder and, one by one, they ran out the rooms with their half-naked selves to save their towels, panties, and bras off the clothing lines.

 

There were fifteen wooden and rusting galvanized-roof shacks in the yard of the brothel. Each room had a thick mattress on the checkered black-and-white linoleum floor; a small speaker box; a small lattice window; a small round mirrored ceramic face sink; a suitcase; a brass vase of dying red hibiscus flowers in the right corner of the floor; an aerosol spray of floral air-freshener; a roll of toilet paper on a shelf; and burgundy lace curtains all balled up in a knot to allow air to freshen up the rooms. Rainwater leaked through some of the roofs straight onto the mattresses.

 

Chino’s mother, Sita, property owner of the brothel, who lived in the same yard with us, came over, dragging a large blue tarpaulin, gasping for breath and occasionally spitting on the floor. Chickens ran towards her gluey mucus and they picked at it like grains. She dropped the tarpaulin in front of my bare feet, scratched her grey coolie hair, flickered thick white dandruff from her fingernails into the air, then she placed her left hand on her hip and pointed her right index finger in my face and said, “Look here gyal, just cover de place until this rain dry up and come see me after. Ah tired. Ah gone.”

 

Already soaked in the rain, I stared at her skinny madras bosie back slowly walking back to her jhoparee. I stared at her jutti pitching mud at the bottom of her yellow saree and I remembered Tasha, my childhood friend from Tacarigua who drowned in a well a day after she turned eight. I could see her in my mind running after a cow straight up to Kandahar Village on a rainy crusade day in August. I could never forget that day Tasha slipped on a blue tarpaulin in Tanty Lalee’s yard and buss her head. I couldn’t bear the memory of the tarpaulin that caused Tasha months of healing, so I took one hard look at it, then I walked away from it.

I grabbed a white pigtail bucket to catch the plopping rainwater that leaked from the edge of the galvanized roof. Water from the pipe was scarce. It came once or twice a week. Sometimes for days, not a drop of water in Chase Village. Chino, our pimp, often told us that the water company deliberately locked off our water supply to put pressure on him to shut down his business.

 

There were twenty-five of us living in the backyard shacks of the brothel. Three locals including me, and the rest were from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Martinique. Two girls had babies including me, and three other women had children. The babies and children all lived with Sita. My baby, Maria, was only nine months old and I didn’t know exactly who was her father. My baby didn’t look anything like me. She was a light-skinned, chubby-legged, Chinese-face, dougla-hair baby, and I was a mocha-skin, skinny girl with Afro hair. I remembered fucking a few men from an offshore company, but I just didn’t know which one was Maria’s father. I didn’t really care about her and sometimes I didn’t believe I had actually kept her. I left it up to Sita to look after her. Sita got money from the child welfare services for all the children she looked after, including mine. She knew how to scam the system.

 

Every day, some of the girls were transported to other brothels far away in the countryside, depending on their legal status. Most of them either left their babies behind with Sita or found a way to take their children for their family or friends in their home country to look after.

 

My best friend, Bella, a thirty-two-year-old Dominicana, had been living in the brothel since she was twenty-seven. Bella and I shared a small room at the back of the brothel. During the daytime, we were allowed to go out and make our own money. Bella and I worked two days a week peeling vegetables in a Chinese restaurant in San Fernando. One day a week Bella learnt English, and I had recently started taking maths lessons. The other days Bella, I, and some of the girls hustled on the marina in Chaguaramas, selling our cunts for pounds, US dollars, yen; any money that pass, we didn’t miss. Some of the girls took English lessons some days in the week to keep their legal status, while others took the risk to work in Chinese-owned variety stores. Chino often warned the girls about jobs that put them at risk of deportation. I was lucky because I was a local and could lie to save myself.

 

From 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., Chino owned us. Every man we fucked, he took and controlled our money. He fed everyone, sent us shopping whenever he felt like, paid for the girls’ legal status, tickets back and forth to their home country to drop off their babies, court charges. He was our fairy godfather. He had many friends in high places, but he wasn’t an easy man to deal with. He often gave us crack to kick off our night’s work and sometimes he’d beat us like he did the pit-bulls he trained. This is why for a long time, I have been considering running away from this place with or without my baby.

 

“Sonya, Sonya, where is Chino? Me no see Chino,” Bella inquired. She covered my head with her towel and dried my arms with her top.

 

“Ah doh care. Ask Sita, she know everything about she son,” I replied.

 

“You no care? Chino have me passport. If me no have passport, me no go no way?” said Bella, pointing at her chest and shaking her head with concern.

 

“Whey yuh going, Bella? There is no way tuh go right now. The police busted Copa Cabana, Miramar, and Ocean Spray last week. Yuh want tuh go tuh jail or get deported? Dem women in de jail will fuck yuh harder than ah man and yuh know what? Chino’s friends, dem is prison officers too. They go fuck yuh even harder if they know Chino owns you. Especially how yuh have sunflower eyes and yuh skin so soft and pink and yuh lips so thin and yuh hips so wide, and yuh hair so blonde, straight and long,” I warned her.

 

“Me no understand you. Chino what? What is da problem? Can you talk slow? You confuse me with Trini talk. You sound like you from Africa. You English is very, very bad!”

 

“Sita want tuh see meh fuh something Ah doh know yet. Come with meh nah? Maybe she know whey she son gone too,” I said slowly and I grabbed Bella’s hand to take her to Sita.

A long trail of violet periwinkle flowers separated Sita’s house from the brothel. Children who lived in the sawmill next door were sliding their asses in the mud, and some were racing after a bicycle tire around Sita’s jhoparee. Sita’s pothounds never liked me. They rushed me in the rain.

 

“Los perros think in he mind that you are ah fantasma,” said Bella and she picked up a few pebbles to pelt the dogs.

 

“Fantasma?” I asked twisting my confused face.

 

“Yea, it is something like ah dead person you cannot see. Ah! Like ah spirit,” she replied, clicking her fingers.

 

“Hahahah, that is ah scary way tuh see people,” I said.

 

“Me abuela would say that you are maldicion. Ah don’t know the word for it in English. But you need ah rosario then go to confesiones. You need to put on white clothing. You spirit, you life will be better. In me country, muchas people Catolicas. Is ah tradition. We love it,” she said waving her hand and smiling with happiness.

 

“I understand you. But I am not Catholic. The woman who Ah live with was ah Hindu like Sita. We have puja fuh bad spirit. Sita knows,” I replied.

 

Under the coconut tree in Sita’s yard, an open mandir with a statute of lord Shiva sat with folded legs on a cushioned fake lion. He was adorned as a lady with long golden mala earrings, a golden trishul firm in his left hand, green beaded bracelets around his wrist, a white lingam drawn on his forehead, a charming snake posed off on his bun-styled hair, and another vicious-looking snake around his blue neck. His lips were raspberry red and his fat cheeks were blushed up with rose. He held his right hand against his chest as if he was giving a pledge. I picked up a yellow buttercup flower on the slippery muddy floor, lit a coconut-soaked wick in a deya, and performed aarti, singing a bhajan:

Om Namah Shivaya, Har Har Bhole Namah Shivay, 

Rameshwara Shiva Rameshwara, Hara Hara Bole Namah Shivay, 

Ganga Dhara Shiva Ganga Dhara, Hara Hara Bole Namah Shivaya 

 

Bella held onto the colored bamboo flags and waited for me in the rain. After I sang the mantra, she hurried me by my arm.

 

“Listen to me, Sonya,” she said. “Sita is ah bad woman.”

 

We walked through the rain and then up the few stairs of Sita’s jhoparee. 

 

“No, she ain’t. Yuh should pray. I go teach yuh. He is Lord Shiva, he killing all evil,” I said.

 

“No! Me is Catolica. Me confess to San Basilio only! You like ah madness. Only think I like is that you God is ah man and he look like ah woman. She pretty lips, rojo. She man and she woman. Me like that.  Eso es poder e igualdad para cada género.  But snake on she body? Maligna! Sita esta loca! If me hungry?  I will never eat from that crazy Sita. Loca. And you Sonya, you crazy too!”

 

Sita was sitting on a rocking chair feeding Maria sugar-water from a plastic baby bottle. Four children were sitting on the floor eating macaroni and ketchup and licking their fingers. Two boys were jumping from a table to the mattress. Bella took off her white cotton frilled top and beat the flies that buzzed around the children’s meal. Salina the red-eyed cat jumped on me, and I flung her on the balata window frame of the tapia house.

 

“Meow, meow, meow” Salina cried.

 

“You see, I know what I talk about. You need change you God,” Bella remonstrated.

 

Sita handed me Maria in a hurry, and I threw her into the air and kissed her all over her belly. Baby Maria’s skin was smooth like the milk Sita offered Lord Ganesh.

 

“She has a bad cold,” I said, listening to Maria’s rattling cough as she giggled “Ma ma, ma ma.”

 

“Ah just squeeze ah lime in she tea,” replied Sita.

“No! give she honey and vaporizer, no lime!” Bella persisted.

 

One of the children who were eating on the floor, a small boy with a swollen, malnourished belly, stood up to stare at us, chewing his thumb. Sita’s jhoparee contained three small bedrooms with seashell-printed shower curtains as doors, an open kitchen, and a littered living room. The dried grass from the clay-filled walls flew in the air whenever the fan breezed the wall. Lizards ran in and out of holes in the walls to catch spiders. There were a few plastic bottles of water under the kitchen sink. Baby cockroaches clambered out of a Styrofoam box, which contained Sita’s cold-storage food on a table in the center of the living room. Dried corn husks and strips of orange peel hung from the low palm grass ceiling of the jhoparee. The smell of soaked dhal filtered the air as if a sewer had been leaking underneath the house. Black and white photos of old folks and a colored baby photo of Chino licking ice cream on the beach were glued to the wall.  A tall brown cardboard barrel with an address in Germany was used as a space saver. An electric kettle, coffee mugs, and Lipton teabags sat on a red-crocheted tablecloth on the top of the barrel. People’s names and addresses and phone numbers were scribbled all over the barrel.

 

Bella examined the colorful picture of Mother Lakshmi that sat on a pitch-oiled lamp near Sita’s rocking chair. When Sita lit a cigarette, Bella took it from her to finish it.

 

“Sita, me no see Chino all day. Where is Chino? We no have enough beers in de bar,” said Bella.

 

“Well this is why Ah wanted tuh see Sonya,” replied Sita and she got out of her rocking chair to make black coffee.

 

“What is da problem for Chino? This morning me have premonition for Chino. I see in me sonar, ah woman with ah gun. Me no understand that woman. Me never see she in me life. She look like ah Trini. Maybe it is you sister, Sonya. She look just like Sonya. Negra and tall and bonita. Big Afro hair!  She and Chino have ah gun. Then me see ah white bird come and Chino go with de bird and I no sleep good after that,” continued Bella propping her head with her hand on Sita’s table.

 

“Ah doh have any sister, Bella! You make me so angry when yuh talk about family. I’m ah Nowherian. Sita should take you tuh she pundit to unfold yuh dream,” I replied, standing up to rock Maria to sleep.

 

“Well Ah get ah call from de police station and they say they have Chino in Remand Yard at de jail. They say they find Chino in Carlsen Field with a kilo of cocaine. And he have ah hearing next week Monday in Chaguanas Magistrate Court. And Ah doh have no money. I eh even get meh pension and de children welfare yet,” Sita paused with a worried look and she continued to weep, saying, “Before Chino father dead, he wanted tuh sell de bar inno. Ah shoulda sell de damn bar. But Ah feel sorry for de girls Chino trying tuh help. Yuh know? Chino doh sell coke! Somebody must be jealous of meh son because he used tuh make money from de bar. And these children Ah minding here, Ah get good people to take them, but Chino doh listen tuh nobody. Ah tired tell he tuh stop helping allyuh. Doh take in no more girls! Leh dem go back home tuh Venezuela and Santo Domingo or wherever he pick them up, on de street, Ah doh know! Ah just want back meh son and fuh he tuh change he life. Now he in jail and me eh have no money. Not ah cent. Ah cyah even buy tablet fuh meh diabetic foot. Oh God, they set up meh son. Chino doh trouble nobody.”

 

“I no understand,” said Bella and she raised her skirt to dry Sita’s tears.

 

“Chino is in carcel.” I explained to Bella.

 

“Chino what? I need me passport. I want get ah man to take me away from Rich Gold and he will help me go back to me country,” Bella boasted.

 

Maria held my neck tight. I felt her little heart pumping on my chest. I looked at myself in a mirror that was nailed to the balata wall frame, and I imaged what my birth mother looked like with me when I was her baby. I have never seen any pictures of myself as a child nor of my mother. I vaguely remember where I got that long deep scar over my eyebrows. It must have been my foster mother. She often beat the shit out of me and that is why I came to Chino.

 

Nobody told me I was pretty except for Bella. And that is why she is the only girl at the brothel my blood took. A woman who knew my real mother told me I smiled just like her. She also told me that my mother had a deep dimple in her cheek just like me. Some people from Kandahar Village told me that my mother died of pneumonia when I was six months old. Other people told me that my mother gave me away because she was on drugs. I never wanted a baby so young in my life, and I didn’t know if I really loved or wanted Maria. Sometimes I did. But I hated my mother for leaving me in the world like this. And I hated Chino for lying to us about our future. He didn’t care. Maybe my father was like Chino. I would do anything to leave this place.

 

“So this is what yuh want tuh tell me Sita? How can I help Chino? I can’t!” I replied and I shoved Maria into her hands.

 

“Ah woman from Rio Claro want tuh buy yuh baby from you. She can’t make babies,” said Sita, putting Maria down on a mattress on the living room floor. 

 

“She buying meh baby? How much money she want tuh give meh?” I asked eagerly.

 

“How much yuh want?” Sita asked seriously.

 

Mosquitoes gathered around Maria’s head. Sita placed a net over her body and fanned her with a newspaper.  I wondered what my daughter would become if I sold her or if she would be better off living with Sita. I didn’t know what to do with her.

 

“What yuh think, Bella? Ah doh know if de police go find meh. People everywhere already know ah make baby,” I worriedly asked.

 

“Just tell them de baby die,” replied Sita, shoving her saree between her legs and fanning Maria faster.

 

“Sonya, let me make ah confesion. Five years ago, me make baby. You know how I get to know Sita? Somebody bring me here, and Sita sell me baby to ah Trinidad woman who now live in Canada. She say she make baby at home in Trinidad and she get ah passport for de baby. Ah get some money and me baby go Canada with de woman to live. No problem! Baby will have ah better life. Baby will not forget you smell, you eyes, you skin. One day, baby will come back to you. I cry for my baby every day but I happy she is in a better life. Así es la vida. Da police no understand nothing in this country. Only for marijuana and cocaine. That is not police business. Okay? So take de money and give de baby away. You start ah new life. You are ah free woman!”

 

“Is she going to miss me?” I turned to Sita.

 

“No! she is going tuh miss me. Not you!” Sita pointed at herself.

 

“Okay, take my baby! Give de woman ah reasonable price. No!” I quickly changed my mind and declared, “Ah want ten thousand dollars. It’s enough fuh a visa and a ticket tuh start a new life in America.” I fantasized about shopping in America with a rich white man.

 

“If de woman come fuh Maria tonight, can I borrow de money tuh bail out Chino and he go give it back tuh you?” Sita was serious.

 

“Tonight? So soon?” I asked.

 

“Well, after midnight. It better Maria goes while she is asleep. When she get up, she won’t see me and she won’t know how she got there. She won’t remember anything,” Sita replied.

 

“Ah don’t trust Chino inno. That money is my only dream,” I replied.

 

“Our dream,” Bella insisted.

 

“Do you trust me? I’m not Chino!” Sita demanded. Her raccoon eyes looked dangerous, reminding me of the snake around Lord Shiva’s neck. The moles on her face made it look like a sour rough lemon. Her fat nose looked inflamed, red and swollen like Krusty the Clown.

 

“Take de baby, Sita! Call me when yuh have meh money,” I said and walked out the jhoparee in haste, leaving Bella with Sita.

 

“Do you want tuh go tuh America? Meh sister living in America inno. She is ah citizen. I can help yuh go tuh America.” Sita’s voice echoed behind me.

 

Later that night, Gloria and nine of us were sniffing hail, dancing to Yoskar Sarante’s La Noche, and dressing up for our night’s work in the garage.

 

“Where is Chino?” Gloria enquired, then she offered me a line of candy coca. After sniffing, I wanted to slap Paola for stealing my client when he came looking for me last Friday and she didn’t call me for him. I saw neon green lines walking past the room. I hugged my tattooed chest tightly and dropped my head on Gloria’s shoulder to gasp quietly for breath. My body went numb and for a few minutes I stood silently, thinking of Maria. The smell of Johnson’s baby powder and clean cotton diapers overwhelmed me. I realized that Sita was right.  Maria would be better off sold or given away, and I could be a free woman in America.

 

“Chino always go to jail. He come back out and he gone again,” replied one of the girls as she rolled her fishnet stockings up her burnt legs.

 

“Me need me passport,” Bella said as she entered the garage.

 

“We don’t need passport. Me don’t want to go back home. There is nothing for me in Bogota. No more!” shouted Sandra.

 

“I want go back home. Mi mama sick and me miss me boyfriend. De men here not nice. De culture is loca. Me need freedom. No like work behind de kitchen, no like hide from police. Life no good here. Is ah racist country. Imigracion like money. No money, no extension.  In me country we eat carne frita and chicharrones de pollo every day. I eat mucho curry and bbq in Trinidad. Curry everywhere! I need food from my country. From my mother!” said Bella, and she bent down to draw a line of candy coca for her stuffy nose.

 

The garage was a large secured space, situated beneath the brothel. We kept our personal belongings there. It was also our secret hiding place whenever the police came to raid. It had a gravel-camouflaged electric gate that locked us inside until we were dressed and ready for work at night. Wardrobes, cardboard boxes, plastic containers, and large blue rubbish bags were labeled with our nicknames.

 

After Betina painted my lips with her dark purple lipstick, she pulled out a pink bralette from her drawer and measured my tits.

 

“My god, you arm smell like ah ram goat,” she said, to the amusement of the other girls.

Sometimes we shared each other’s clothing, wigs, lace stockings, weaves, high heels, lipsticks, jewelry, and perfumes.

 

“Give it to me,” shouted Isabella, and she grabbed the bralette from Betina.

 

“No, yuh greedy bitch,” I replied, and I punched Isabella in the face.

 

When Isabella scraped my dark smooth face, I wanted to murder her. I pulled off her wig and choked her. Some of the girls screamed when Bella jumped in to help me punch Isabella some more.

 

Some of Isabella’s friends pulled me off her.

 

“You nothing but ugly n—! Nobody wants you!” Isabella cursed me.

 

When Sita heard the smashing sounds of beer bottles on the wall, she ran into the garage with two children holding on tight to the end of her saree.

 

“Yuh see wha happening here already? Ah fed up. Ah trying meh best tuh raise allyuh children and put dem in good homes and look how allyuh mashing up meh place,” quarreled Sita.

 

Hidden in the center of some of the mattresses that were spread on the floor, were unused condoms, packets of heroin, cocaine powder, and kush, rubber gloves, needles and syringes, packets of extra strength Panadol, bottles of sleeping pills, antibiotic pills, and an untouched diamond-black 9mm, seventeen-round pistol. Colombian, Venezuelan, and Dominican Republic flags fluttered from the ceiling as the fan recycled the dark eau de toilette air. Artificial silk flowered headwear wreaths, straw hats, and sunglasses adorned the white bald heads of Pinocchio-nose mannequins. Metal filigree masquerade masks, purple carnival beads, and a rosary hung around the neck and on top of the ivory white-veiled head of a statue of the praying Mother Mary standing in a corner. Half-burnt white candles lay at her feet. The small toilet and bathroom near the entrance were barely visible behind a montage of world maps and geometric-patterned Chinese fans.

 

Not all the girls came out that night. Some stayed in the garage either jacking up heroin or sick, rotting away in a locked, abandoned room Chino kept for the sick. Those who were working wore white mini-skirts cut right under our bottom, carnivalesque bras, thick high heels, and dark and bright-colored lipsticks, wigs. We often shared each other’s perfume—as long as it was cheap. We walked into the bar together, and the men, already drunk, were waiting for us. My handbag was packed with a bag of Xanax to put bad guys to sleep, a penknife, condoms, cigarettes, a lighter, and lubricating gel. Most of the guys liked fucking me in my ass, which I didn’t mind. In fact, I preferred it because they came faster and it paid more than a blowjob or anything else.

 

Chino’s right-hand man, Hawkeye, had been checking in a few part-time night workers, bartenders, and off-duty policemen. When the jukebox played bachata, a few of the girls did the mariposa dance on the rainbow-colored poles, which were surrounded by pool tables, slot machines, and chairs. Their legs opened wide as an ostrich opening its mouth. You could see their silk v-string thongs stuck tight in their vaginas and their hips grinding up and down the poles as men gaped hungrily, squeezing their balls and trying to figure out which one they wanted.

 

Bella came out of her room to tease the drinking men.

 

“Aye papi no lo hagas asi,” she shouted with a sign language to inform another girl to avoid a certain client because he was a cheap motherfucker.

 

In each bar room, there were mugshot photos of bandits who had robbed brothels in the village. We often looked at the photos to see if they matched our clients before negotiating price with them. I sat in room number three and recognized a regular client of mine. He wanted me again and knew how to follow me to my room in the back of Rich Gold.

 

My client preferred a dark room, and he didn’t like me looking at him. I knew he was a wealthy married, Muslim business owner from Point Fortin. Bella used to work for him. She used to babysit his children. Bella once told me he had fucked her, too. Each time he fucked me, I learnt something new about him. But this time he he had nothing to say to me. His long beard was shorter than usual, and his cold face looked like frozen salted prunes. When I undressed myself, he gently turned my face away from him and positioned my body in a back-shot posture. My head and the shape of my wig resembled Cleopatra in the shadow of the lattice window. The night pumped to the lyrics of La Noche:

En vano aliento mi rencor 
Y espero el dia para odiar 
La noche me hace recordar 
Que no soy nada sin tu amor. 
La noche 
Me hace volver, 
enloquecer. 

Enloquecer.

 

My client’s enlarged cock stuck firm into my vagina, and, as he pounded to the music, I thought about how much I missed Chino that night. My client fucked me nonstop until his sweat rinsed my spine. I looked back at him, and he warned me, “Don’t look at me!”

 

“It hurts!” I replied.

 

When I looked away again, through the window, I saw a strange woman walking out of the backyard carrying my baby and Sita behind her with a large cardboard box in her hands. There was nothing I could have done to stop Sita. Watching the woman and my baby leave, I wept in silence.

 

Glossary

Aarti: a Hindu religious ritual of workship.

Abuela: grandmother

Aye papi no lo hagas asi: daddy don’t do it that way

Bachata: popular music from the Dominican Republic, often associated with brothels

Bhajan: a devotional song in Hindi.

Bonita: pretty (female)

Candy Coca: a grade of cocaine/street name for cocaine

Carcel: jail

Carne frita: fried meat

Chicharrones de pollo: chicken cracklings

Deya: an oil lamp originating in India, usually made from clay, with a cotton wick dipped in ghee or coconut oil.

Dougla: a Caribbean Hindustani word for a person of mixed races (Afro-Indian descent)/illegitimate or bastard

Fantasma: ghost

Hail: a grade of cocaine/street name for cocaine

Jhoparee: a tapia house constructed from indigenous materials which include a mixture of forest lumber, leaves from palms/grasses and clay.

Jutti: Indian footwear (associated with royalty) made of leather and embroidery.

Kush: a high grade of marijuana.

Los perros: the dogs

Mala: prayer beads

Maldicion: blight

Malinga: bad/Evil

Mandir: Hindu temple

Mariposa: butterfly

Negra: a black woman of African descent

Nowherian: a person of no fixed place of abode

Puja: the act of worship in Hinduism
Jhandi: a common sight inside or outside the Hindu home situated next to a temple. It is usually made of bamboo poles and coloured flags. Each coloured flag represents a deity.

San Basilio: Saint Basil of Caesarea (Bishop, Confessor and Doctor of the Catholic/Anglican/Orthodox church)

Saree: a garment consisting of a length of cotton or silk elaborately draped around the body, traditionally worn by Indian and Asian women.

Sonar: dream

Trishul: a three-pronged weapon of Lord Shiva (Hindu mythology)

Share

Some Trees: An Incidental Elegy

This essay was a finalist in the 2018 Editors’ Awards
competition here at The Florida Review. We’re proud
to present it here in Aquifer.

 

Let me be clear: I read the classifieds because I had nobody. Five or six years into the new century, I trudged through Southeast Portland, rented the upper level of a duplex across the street from a bar that served fried chicken all night and $1.75 domestics. I never cut back the ivy that crept all the way over the second floor windows, so the light in my room was always dim. In any case, the sky was invariably grey. The rain was less rain but fine mist.

 

In the mornings, I waited for the bus with the smell of yesterday’s oil in the fryers. I took the local newspaper from a dispenser outside the bar, then the same seat on the same bus every day. There were poems tacked above the windows as part of a citywide initiative to bring art closer to daily life. Each morning I read the same John Ashbery poem opposite my seat then opened the local newspaper and turned to the classifieds: the personal ads; items for sale or trade; miscellaneous services; missed connections. I never bought anything. I never replied. But I needed the idea that there were people on the other side. And the newspaper let me believe that even though I stayed so isolated. Other people existed, and as they existed they felt, and reached out with their advertisements. Not only did they exist but they were also alone and—since moved to action—maybe even more alone than I was.

 

Through these grey months, there is a single ad I remember most. It stood out among the used microwaves, gently worn tires, and everyday loneliness. It was exuberant. I could not believe it was real: a man, beneath a name eccentric and rich with consonants, offering formal pinball lessons at a location close to my duplex, and offering them in a tone ripe with awareness that these lessons were precisely what the world needed. “Master the flipper. Amaze your friends.” I tore the ad from the newspaper, circled it with a blue sharpie and tacked it on the fridge. I did not call. To call would invite the possibility that it wasn’t real. And I had to believe it was, that this person existed, offering his service at a time when all I could muster by way of invitation to the world was to drink too many $1.75 beers and in the morning peer into the semi-darkness through the windows of a bus.

 

—

 

A mile or so southwest of Fish Lake, Utah, there is a run of aspen more than 80,000 years old. The dendrologists have given it a name—Pando, from the Latin to mean “I spread.” Although Pando covers over one hundred acres and appears to be a forest containing a multitude of separate trees, it is in fact a single organism with a vast, interconnected root system, a clonal colony of Populus tremuloides or quaking aspen. Pando’s approximated mass of 13 million pounds lands it in the running to be the heaviest organism on the planet, and at 80,000 years old, very possibly the oldest. But even such an unfathomable lifespan may be an underestimation: some dendrologists argue that traditional aging techniques are inappropriate here and in fact Pando is closer to one million years old. One million years. I am thirty-eight. Yesterday I was looking at photographs from the early 1980s and felt a bodily dissonance between the world then and now. But Pando met existence in an era before human language and still exists today, adjacent to our sphere of depleted fossil fuels, snowballing automation, and deceit.

 

I keep saying “it,” but Pando is a “he.” This proliferation is the result of the asexual reproduction of a single male plant. It seems strange to me that such plurality could be contained in a male organism. I would immediately assume such capacity to be female, although it should be noted that in keeping with a cardinal condition of maleness, Pando has thrived and spread in the most favorable conditions possible. Geographic and climatic variations over the millennia have effectively wiped out competition from species of conifer or other younger aspen.

 

If there are degrees of solitude then Pando represents an exponential function. He may be prolific, but he is alone and—with only countless iterations of himself for company over thousands and thousands of years—compelled into an everted kind of introspection. It has been 10,000 years since Pando’s last successful flowering. The climate of central Utah is gradually warming, and, despite his monumental proclivity for survival, it has been agreed by the various dendrologists, environmentalists, and biologists that Pando is dying. The experts cannot be certain why. Grazing elk may have depleted new shoots and stems to replace the old. It could be the result of drought, of insect infestation. Or it could be that after multiple epochs, Pando has finally had enough. Regardless of the reason, without new growth the end is coming, and when it comes it could be sudden.

 

—

 

I am interested in impossible writing. As such I am interested in the plural text: how facing the impossible in language may necessitate and birth a text that dwells in the fractured amalgam of two or more known forms. I am interested in the new text that finds form in the aperture that this fracture creates: the text that becomes possible as the imprint of writing into the impossible. Such a work is realized through the multiplicitous capacity of that imprint, which is itself a function of the multiplicity inherent to language itself. Every word is a kaleidoscope of subjectivities, tamed by the socially determined conditions for its usage. The word was not complicit in this agreement. And words are not, by their nature, tame. To assume they are is dangerous. Every word maintains the radical potential for departure, and as such this potential for movement is retained by any sum of these parts. You cannot build a house of mirrors and not expect it to reflect the light.

 

So then a text that may appear in prose, in service to the form of the essay, may be constructed around an architecture more readily associated with poetry, containing further architectures beneath its surface, narratives that exist independent of the semantic value of the language. I mention this now because these are the ways a singular text might transcend its apparent plurality, how every word leads multiple lives in the air and on the page, and most importantly how a run of trees near a lake in Utah may indeed be the single oldest and most massive living organism on our planet.

 

This morning I flicked through images of Pando I found on the internet. Some had verses of scripture superimposed on the photographs. Others diagrammed the connection of each tree to its shared system of roots. Almost without exception, the photographs were taken in the annual interlude when the aspen leaves hang golden on pale boughs—that moment of transition, multiplied across acres of forest in singular association. I reread the poem I had read hundreds of times from my seat on the bus, John Ashbery’s “Some Trees.” Here it is again, today, opening in quiet triumph, moving through a quaking order into ordained stillness, deferring meaning toward a reality in which different perceptive realms are allowed to exist simultaneously. In each, the world is reborn: into the collapsed dimensions of space; a new desert music; the ramshackle frames we place upon time; the universe of the poem. “These are amazing: each / Joining a neighbor, as though speech / Were a still performance.”

 

—

 

Several years ago, at a time between the bus rides in Portland and my life here today, I went on a weekend training to become a hospice volunteer. I ascended an elevator to the fifth floor of the largest office building of an out-of-town business park and took my seat in a loose horseshoe of Formica trestles that opened onto a cheap-looking podium. A young woman stood in front of the podium and greeted each prospective volunteer with a cheerful nod. This disposition, complemented by her yellow pantsuit, suggested she was only stopping by en route to a less somber occasion, so much so that when she spoke I was disarmed by the soft attention in her voice. If we had been recently bereaved, she explained, we were encouraged to withdraw from this session and enroll at a later date. She did not specify how much later, how long grief might linger until it became manageable, until we felt able to move beneath it and perhaps take on some portion of the grief of others. Nevertheless, her message was clear: if you think this may be too much, it will be.

 

Morning sun cut through the Venetian blinds leaving a thatch of light and shade on the Formica. A man in navy plaid cleared his throat. His cat had died the previous weekend. The room mumbled condolence. Nobody left, though soon enough the cheerful woman surrendered the podium to a middle-aged chaplain in a purple cardigan and red eyeglasses. She stayed for the chaplain’s introduction then issued a final smile and nod into the room as she turned and departed.

 

That morning we made our own introductions, talked a lot, drank coffee from diminutive paper cups, and assembled into various combinations of small and large groups. We watched films and slide shows about the ways people might leave their lives, about the companions who surrounded this passage, how they had begun to find meaning there, the way such rupture could not be closed but could become more familiar. Each table had a small box of tissues and a pale blue wallet folder with our agenda. We worked through it together, establishing a solid but temporary kind of trust. We ate sandwiches in the lunchroom. We did not really become friends.

 

On the second day, the chaplain led us through what she described as a difficult but important exercise. She closed the blinds and dimmed the lights in the room. She pressed play on a portable CD player: the sound of waves breaking, then piano, a harp. Close your eyes. We were to imagine ourselves in a private room, months after our own diagnosis of an aggressive cancer. There had been many treatments, visits, hopes, painkillers. Over the last few weeks, though, a new weakness had set in. Breathing had become labor. Movement required disproportionate effort. The time was drawing close.

 

In the midst of this scenario, the chaplain had us compose a list of those we held closest, and at the threshold of our departure from them, to select one name from that list and write. What would we speak on the cusp of speech becoming impossible? How would we locate the language of this transition? What would we say if we could?

 

—

 

Over the next months, I could not shake the idea of this utterance when facing the impossible; the language that originates both with and against death. I read deeply toward and around it. I found an anthology of Japanese jisei—haiku-like poems composed on the verge of death. I read Akutagawa and Edouard Leve. Desiring something more immediate, I found suicide notes collected on the internet and read them, and read them again. I felt suddenly like a tourist and withdrew and returned to the exercise I had learned in hospice training. I selected a name. I wrote toward them. I read. I returned again.

 

And I still return. Because it is this utterance that forms the center of everything I would write—this text spoken into the impossible, its capacity to contain all that it contains which is the impossible itself, the uncontainable. I want to bring language to approach the unapproachable. I want to bear witness to a singular text that holds these infinite pluralities. I want to watch it buckle. I want to see it fall.

 

I want the elusive syntax that embodies multiplicity, that collapses the moment and makes “tense” unnecessary, that creates a new pronoun rare to the ear but personal to all such that as I write I might address not only a named individual but everyone I have ever known and loved with no lapse in intimacy.

 

—

 

It wasn’t long after I found the pinball ad that my life changed. The events were as independent as two events in a single life can be. I met my partner in a different bar. The loneliness I had worn as a badge of honor began to subside. I rode the bus less frequently. I took myself and my life less seriously. My need for the classifieds diminished. The landlord’s son came by to cut the ivy from the windows, and it was too bright in the mornings. But the ad stayed on my refrigerator the whole year until I moved out of the duplex, then found a new space on our new refrigerator in our new apartment together. Then the next year when we made the cross country-drive to Colorado and started up again, we started up with the ad on the refrigerator. Master the flipper. Amaze your friends.

 

More than ten years passed. I don’t know why I googled the pinball guru. I don’t know what it was about that particular day that made me remember his ad, made me want to know. Considering it now, it was something more gradual: coming to a place where it didn’t matter if there had been a person behind the ad, if the man with the eccentric name had not been real. I no longer needed anything from him, and in turn, now feel an almost insurmountable distance between the person I was, drinking and sleeping alone in Southeast Portland, and the physician, husband, and father of two who is writing this.

 

I typed the name into the search bar and found an article from around the time I’d seen his ad, the top hit, an interview, conducted by the first and only person to take him up on lessons. They were real. I found a photograph of him beside a pinball machine, wearing a black and red shirt, not quite smiling. I found his real name, his photography and artist’s statement. Then I found the news of his death, tributes from the local pinball community, and, finally, posted by close friends on a personal blog, I found his suicide note.

 

It was long, more than four pages in single spaced ten-point Times. He had mailed it to arrive after he was already gone. And I realized that somebody must have sat and transcribed it, word for word, from the copy that arrived in the mail into the version published on the blog. I wanted to know if it had been written by hand. I wanted to know how. And then I felt stupid and invasive, that this wasn’t mine and could never be mine, and I closed my computer and sat in silence.

 

I turned over the basement trying to find the ad. I sorted through boxes looking for a scrap of newsprint with a classified circled in blue sharpie. I did not find it.

 

I came back the next day and clicked through his photographs, many of them arresting and beautiful, one in particular: the corner of a large building in black and white, spindled winter branches reaching over the foreground, silhouetted against grey concrete; pages and pages before the posts stopped abruptly in February 2011. I thought maybe there was another folder in another box in the basement. I continued this way for several days, turning toward him, then away. After nearly three weeks, I read the note.

 

—

 

It opens with love, apology, the blunt necessity of his action. That it would arrive after he was gone was long planned: he admits the prose itself had been through several drafts and revisions. His suffering is palpable throughout. As is the brute fact of his last desire—that he might cease to exist, that he might never have existed, caught in an excruciating balance with a fear of hurting those around him, of whom I was never one. His life touched mine in only the smallest way. It feels close to ridiculous that I need to take this so far.

 

“Pain is a relative beast,” he writes. And I understand that although sadness exists on a spectrum, despair is a singularity, whose gravity is infinite and cannot be escaped. There is sadness that drinks $1.75 beers alone. There is a far deeper sadness that casts spindled silhouettes over everything we build.

 

In the basement of the safety-net hospital in Denver is the Correctional Care Medical Facility. It is effectively a jail where patients who are incarcerated or in police custody can receive care. When I started my training there, a nurse told me about two women who had transferred from a regional prison with infected upper extremity wounds. They had cut into their arms and stuffed scraps of food into the lacerations hoping for the very infections they developed, for their transfer to the basement of the hospital where they lay handcuffed to the bed, hoping, because even this was better than where they were.

 

What I read over the single-spaced pages of the suicide note was that any previous capacity for hope had been absolutely depleted. Not only was it gone, but there was nothing that might bring it back. Not art, nor companionship, nor medication or other drugs: nothing that could imprint upon this pain. I like to think I may know something of distress, and that in turn I am developing a capacity for a broadening empathy. I have tried to place myself in such proximities, to be present and to listen. But I realize I know nothing. Because beside this darkness I have nothing, no true frame of reference for these emotions, no apparatus to understand this despair. It remains, always, around the next curve of the bay, hidden by the rocks and crashing waves, immense and impossible.

 

—

 

Midway through the note there is a volta, away from the devastation of personal struggle and toward the collective failure of humanity to examine ourselves, complicity in the gross disparities that are the engines of capitalism, our shattering capacity for willful ignorance, that cruelty. But it is in this bleak assessment of the world he is leaving that something emerges, that there could be a collective engagement to remedy our failures. “We must all learn to think on a vastly larger scale,” he writes. We must cultivate our capacity for empathy. We must indulge the pure qualities of our consciousness through education, through creativity, and through art.

 

It is art that has the negative capability to address the impossible, the potential to perform various grammars of simultaneity. The practice of art is an engagement of the imaginative mind at its intersection with the practical and as such a gesture toward simultaneity. In turn, a gesture toward simultaneity is a gesture toward the impossible. I want an art with the capacity to stack our multiple perceptual, introspective, and reflective realms into a simultaneous moment of consciousness, a mirror for the plural activities of thought. I want these moments multiplied across our numerous essays and failures. I want their silhouettes to thatch our daily lives, fading and brightening with the light and shade, for it is these oscillations that are the motor of our transcendence: to breathe, to fail, to return, to create.

 

When we realize this capacity is when we begin writing the impossible. A poetics of mortality depends on failure just as art is itself both a practice of failure and the persistent return from that failure. In this respect, the only requirements of the impossible are honesty and imagination. We need be nothing but ourselves: luminous beings that somehow occupy bodies, displacing in our own crude echoes the invisible matter that surrounds us, a silence already filled with noises.

 

—

 

On June 4, 1923, Frank Hayes, a thirty-five-year-old stableman, horse trainer, and occasional jockey, won the Belmont Steeplechase despite sitting dead in the saddle. He had been alive when the race began, had suffered a massive heart attack at some point before his horse, Sweet Kiss, crossed the line at 20-1 to win by a head. It was only when the owner and stewards approached him with congratulations that they noticed something amiss.

 

There is a middle-aged white man at the counter. He orders a cup of coffee. “Small, medium, or large?” asks the barista.

 

“Medium,” says the man, before the barista can finish the word “large.”

 

“Room for cream?” she asks.

 

“No,” says the man, “room for milk. For milk.”

 

But, I want to tell him, this is an absence that does not specify. It cannot decide on the presence that will take its place. As when god withdrew from the world to make room for creation, there was no specification for what would fill that space. Absence cannot see beyond itself because it has no beyond, the way grief is a kind of gravity: it doesn’t care who you are. What I am trying to say is that we will not be present for our own deaths, only the moments leading up to them. We cannot orchestrate the absence we will leave, despite our best attempts: notes left, debts paid, jockey’s silks pressed, 2% not half and half.

 

It’s all just around the next curve of the bay: children sleeping under blankets in the back seat of a 1980s sedan; a racehorse at full tilt with a dead man in the saddle; the tremendous quaking aspen southwest of Fish Lake; the moments in which we are able to move, to take on some portion of the grief of others; a man, an artist, in so much pain that he has tragically and meticulously chosen absence over presence.

 

—

 

When I was working the night shift at the safety-net hospital, I admitted a man to the inpatient mental health unit. I admitted hundreds of people for various ailments that year, but this man I remember so clearly. He had been seen in the ER for “suicidal ideation,” sent directly to psychiatric emergency services where upon more thorough evaluation had been adjudged an imminent danger to himself. He did not dispute this.

 

We sat a table on the acute unit where any means for self-harm had been meticulously removed. There were no door handles from which a noose might be tied. The blue plastic chairs in which we sat had only the softest contours, weighted so heavily as to resist being easily picked up or thrown. He kept his spine straight in his seat. Behind him through the wide windows spread out the condominiums and office blocks downtown. I will not describe his face, the color of his hair or eyes. I will leave unmentioned the particular timbre of his voice, but from this plastic seat with the city behind him, he spoke as an observer of an utterly impenetrable world, not as one who dwelt within that world but as one who had become only witness, removed from immediate experience, envious now of the objects around him: the table in his apartment, the books on the shelves beside it, the quiet trees outside his own window at home, their bare branches, their fallen leaves.

 

“When my body becomes ashes,” he said, “then I’ll become an object, too.” And he showed me the scars on his forearms, an inch or so proximal to his wrists, on his right side creeping onto his palm. They were mostly signatures of older wounds, years ago, the result of burning himself with cigarettes in brutal but earnest inquiries into whether he might still feel pain, feel anything. Most—aside from one fresh blister, that one seared only days prior to our encounter.

 

I saw such visceral self-interrogation on a disarmingly frequent basis that year. What marked this man apart was his attitude to these injuries. As he held his wrists out to me, he was not proud or ashamed. He did not wear his scars as medals, as intended testimony to the pitch of his suffering. He wore them with utter indifference, carried them as one would carry only the brute facts that returned him to an exhausting and circular logic: the drive to become object, accessible only through an act of ultimate subjectivity.

 

—

 

For the three or four years that bridged the 1980s and 1990s, after school was out for summer, we packed up the family sedan until it could bear no more weight. My father took his two-week holiday, and we crawled out of the driveway, to the south coast, on a passenger ferry, then along the Autoroutes of France until we came to a campsite by a lake about an hour south of Bordeaux. We unloaded the car into our rented trailer surrounded by maritime pine and spent every day at the freshwater lake. We were children. The water at the edge was shallow and warm, gradually deepening until the temperature chilled and the depth dropped off dramatically. The sudden difference meant you could stand chest high as a ten-year-old and stare out into the dark expanse of open water. We swam into that darkness and tried to find the bottom. We treaded water with no grasp of what might lie beneath. Younger siblings played closer to the shore. Our parents reclined on beach loungers, but my cousin and I, this is where we stayed, close to the darkness, swimming in and out, diving as deep as we could then returning to the shallows.

 

I have made several resolutions. I will make the journey to Fish Lake, Utah, and I will stand among the aspen. I will return to Portland, ride the same bus route and recite the poem I will have learnt by heart. When I do so, I will speak clearly. My voice will be sure. I will continue to place myself as close as I can to these things that I cannot fathom. I will swim into them. I will establish a new syntax of transition, I will live and write inside it, then I will burn it to the ground.

 

To write toward death is to engage the impossible. It is to pace the same ground over and over, to initiate and repeat, to mire oneself voluntarily, to sink. But it is also to remember oneself as an embodied being, with a beginning and with an end, capable of touching other lives in unknown or apparently trivial ways, seldom in plain sight, but in an unseen and tantalizing proximity.

 

You will be with me at the bus stop in the smell of last night’s fryers. You will be with me in the dark, on worn upholstery. You will be with me in the places where language refuses, light thatched on Formica, when breath becomes labor. You will be with me as our silhouettes rise and depart from each other, dappling the tallest buildings, taking leave from our bodies to maunder the city alone. Pinball is dying. Pando is dying. But for this instant, in these golden minutes we are here together, and everything I say to you, I say to myself:

 

If you think this may be too much, it will be.

 

Learn to think on a vastly larger scale.

 

Master the flipper.

 

Amaze your friends.

 

You and I are suddenly what the trees try to tell us we are.

Share

What We Ate

Not loin chops cooked Moroccan style,

 palm-sized, presented like gifts

simmering with harrisa-spiked hummus,

 nor the shoulder placed atop a small knoll

of onions and peppers, flavor brimming

 in each slashed sinew, but the heart,

that muscle which, to me, still seems untouchable

 in the hierarchy of organs. In French curry

we ate what once beat in the smooth body

 of the lamb, the taste of iron coiled

around our tongues like a rope swing,

 the meat perfectly tender to chew

on a dilemma: better to waste nothing

 or keep one thing sacred, worshipped

as we do our own ventricles?

 And as we swallowed I did not think

of the lamb force-fed with a stomach tube

 in a barn in North Georgia, its legs wobbly

on an altar of hay, but a hundred other hearts—

 Nefertiti’s pulsing wildly for the sun god Aten,

Napoleon’s stopped briefly at Waterloo,

 and those closer, more real—

my mother’s stepped on like an amaryllis

 in a field swollen with weeds, my brother’s

heart, desires I’ll never know, humming

 like a complex engine, its pistons

clogging with blood, and so forgive me,

 little ounce of lamb, for taking

your heart on a piece of jagged

 ciabbata, and when I say I forced you down

with water, believe me when I tell you

 I took only the slightest pleasure

and that I did not clean my plate.

Share