“What happens after we die?” is a question that has intrigued humanity for millenniums and is perhaps the greatest enigma of all time. Of the estimated 118 billion humans that have died, zero returned with conclusive proof of an afterlife.

When I was in my late teens, seven of my father’s male friends died within a year and a half. Not husbands of my mother’s women friends. These were men my father knew independent of Mom. I don’t remember him outwardly showing emotion though I’m sure he was, at the very least, sad.

This series of photographs, titled “Coastal Grey,” depicts elements of summer themes. My goal was to capture a vibrant setting and allow the viewer to realize it remains vibrant even though color is lacking.

I paint landscapes, interiors, exteriors, still life’s with figures interacting and posing for the camera displaying memorable moments with families, friends, and neighbors.

If you head downstream, there’s a waterfall that empties into a natural pool so deep that no one has found the bottom yet, which means it’s perfect for practicing the fanciest of dives and biggest of cannonballs. But it was also a great place to lazily float in large, gentle circles.

Chelsea Hartman stared out of her bedroom window, a dull ache deep within her chest. Her once vibrant world had become a monochromatic landscape, devoid of laughter and girlhood friends. Just like every morning for the past few weeks, she watched as the sun peeked through the clouds that hung over Southern California. The sudden closure of her school just as she was about to return after Spring Break marked the beginning of her isolated life.

Mother Teresa did what she always did when she found Jesus in distressing disguise. She rolled up her sleeves and got to work. This time she found the Christ in a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican youth from the Bronx, already in the advanced stages of AIDS, nearly blind and with lesions from Kaposi’s Sarcoma all over his body. His father was sitting on a chair next to Francisco, silently weeping.

“Richard, how goes it?”
“It’s another day in paradise.”
That was a repetition of Richard’s throughout my time at Beal. Intended to be ironic, he and I both knew Beal wasn’t paradise. He and I both knew it wasn’t hell either.

May 1955
“You mean the green note?”
Miss Talone hit a key on the piano with a firm finger. “C-sharp—above middle C.”
Brenda Canavan played the D scale backwards and forwards. “Like that?”
Miss Talone nodded. “Good, just like G, but with C-sharp added.” She smiled. “Or, the green note, as you called it.”

A paper Burger King Crown,
Lunch with mom in the park,

She adjusts it over and over,
But it never fits right upon your head.

“What is your religion?”
Coming across with the severity of a grand inquisitor, this isn’t a question we expect from a Lyft driver, though it is a question that transports us. It takes us quickly into another scene, another story, another genre.

When I arrived home from the hospital,
there was a gift box at my doorstep
from my daughter, who recently moved away.

When a former lover asked me to describe myself, I always answered that I am simple and complex. This response, intended not to be facetious but rather to dichotomize my essence, reflects the coexistence within me of simplicity and complexity. This duality, I believe, is present in almost all socialized and experienced beings.

the winter-bare forsythia is so many
arrows of neglect, bundled;
the light, quilted, a question.

It has been said to me by various barroom loafers – the sort of wise but disordered, self-tortured drunks that would be at home inside Eddie Caro’s Chinchorro, the harbor dive where the therianthropic characters of Brendan Shay Basham’s Swim Home to the Vanished meet to prophesize and lament — that all of which a person has inside of them has been given by their ancestors, that despite how We strive for a different or better life, We all are meant for the track laid by those of which come before us.

Skin stippled with drops from the emerald canopy
quietly content with the other,
no need to speak over
the rustling soundtrack of ironwood sway.

Well before dawn at 4:30 a.m., Chrysti and I met at the Humane Borders truck yard, loaded our gear for the day into the water truck, checked the tires, gas gauge and water tank levels, climbed into the truck and headed out to US 286 toward the border. We had the roads pretty much to ourselves.

I lied when I said he’d been clean for a year.
It made a better story:
Addict resisting the call of meth,
riding the wave when the desire hit,
how big he felt—and bigger.

The first day, early morning

I wake up to lights in my face again. Right in my eyes, beaming back through a crack in my head. This is at least the eighteenth time they’ve come by in one night. I’m counting them like sheep to pass the time as they cycle in, their voices changing every couple hours.

This morning I wanted
there to be eyes watching
out for us, something somewhere

caring that we died,

Windshield shatters as a spider web rendition that augurs worse to come. A transforming moment, mind informs, a new normal launches now. “Damage report, Mr. Spock,” fills ears from St. Louis freshman memories of Star Trek when a ten-inch TV box peeked through dorm desk detritus to instill space flight fantasies beside what lectures handed down of conniving bishops and their kings.

I am sure that everyone in my familia really enjoys flan.
But not me.
May I please taste the glazed churro,
the timeless cochito (con café and cream) or the delicate
tres leche cake.

He gazes at me large-eyed as I flip through the album pages of the tinged-with-age black-and-white photographs. I hoist him over my shoulder, pat his back gently for a burp and continue to peruse images of myself—baby me cradled in my father’s arms as I now cradle my son, three-year old me uncomfortably groomed and garbed for a birthday party…

You want my love but don’t want my pain,
My sunshine, but not my rain.
Can’t you see how that’s driving me insane?