“Step aside, rubberneckers!” Four pushed passed a throng of sweaty tourists gawking and taking pictures outside the Bradbury building in the golden mid-morning downtown Los Angele’s sunlight.
A long-haired-blond-Norwegian-sunburned-surfer-looking-guy and a punk-rock-Japanese-lady-with-pigtails-in-her hair…
Edith fell deeper into a nightmare while her younger sister, Wiktoria, busied herself in the kitchen. The apartment was small enough that the sounds of Wiktoria’s two small children eating their breakfasts carried into the spare room where Edith slept and transformed into the soundscape of her nightmare.
My brother and I are twins. My brother, Ben, and I don’t look alike, and our demeanors can’t be more different. But we are brothers, joined from that sparkling moment of conception, used to sharing common quarters, food supply, and our mother’s attention…
Todd—I have looked over the latest materials the DA sent you. You must be desperate! Are you sure this is everything? As you know, I scoured the depositions and interrogatories last week, and Phil has my report on those. Did you guys even talk to each other? How are you planning to defend Mrs. Bierman?
I stared at a room full of strangers, students, when my heart most recently shattered. The scattering of its pieces on the classroom floor can be attributed to the following four words: “Who is Paul Bunyan?”
Rainy had left the backdoor open to the cold sweat of the world, its swinging clanks her remains, as if she were now the wind itself – whipping around the loose, lilting porch and flying off the faded shingles of the roof…
The last week of July in 2009 is the craziest week that Dr. Wu has had since she became a Rehab physician fifteen years ago.
Dr. Wu moved from the Midwest to the Northeast in early July, and thus far, her transition to the new hospital has been smooth. At the age of fifty, she is proud of her adaptability.
He took the fat wooden hangers out, made room for his Bible, Bakunin’s manifesto on anarchy, thankfully thin, stuffed neatly between testaments. The guards at Castle Gardens would no doubt rifle through his dirty frontier shirts and gravy-stained zupan.
Obediently, the baby
opens her mouth
to the spoon.
She has watched the adults
opening their mouths
around the table for so long,
When Carlito’s son suffocated to death in the back seat of his father’s brand-new Mercedes SUV, Caridad García felt all her suspicions had been confirmed. Maybe her son’s sudden fame and fortune were not a blessing but a curse. Everything had happened so quickly since the release of Carlito’s single “Love a la Cubana,” a song sung in English to a salsa beat.
Dear Paul,
When your hospice nurse called, I was drumming my fingers in a parking space at a Bixby’s drive-thru, aching for the large, 550-calorie caramel cappuccino I ordered online. Anything to get me through Mom’s 4:00 cocktail hour.
Listen to the wind, its
strings and strains of
language and song
pulling you to your feet;
a ragdoll animated and living.
Osuke felt a twinge of unease as he strode across the scarlet carpet toward the host in the velvet robe with glimmers of silver. Megumi looked glad to see the young man and pleased that he had picked out an elegant dark suit for this occasion.
I’m not allowed to go to Grandma’s hospital room because I’m only twelve years old, and the hospital regulations say I need to be at least thirteen or accompanied by an adult.
The water level rose to the floor of their hut despite it being a few feet off the ground. Nimuel rushed around their home, gathering everything he could carry while Ligaya got herself and their newborn together. She moved slowly, still sore from giving birth only hours before.
Cherry Blossom Forest
Les Femmes Mondiales Black and White
Hurricane
Chicago Ice
Los Angeles to Santa Barbara
To my parents’ dismay, I took full advantage of New York City’s disco era in the late 1970s till the mid-80s. I did go to NYU undergraduate, but if someone asks, “What was your major?” I answer “Night Life.”
Athletic vitality invites gym walls of vivid colors, players spilling onto courts with crimson tones fitting coming contests yet pale walls circumscribe this setting, matching well-worn olive sweatshirts, khaki pants and lemon tees as men of subdued spirit shuffle in beneath torn net strands, symbols of their fall.
I was walking the trails through the oak forest on our property, looking for the pair of pileated woodpeckers I could hear furiously pounding their heads against a tree trunk. My phone rang with a similar rhythmic urgency in my pocket, as though in conversation with the woodpeckers.
She disappears
takes with her
something created together
I move forward to where she stood
the absence of her presence
leaves behind a vacuum
The possible face stares back at me
from across the weedy, ragged backyard,
its dark grey oval rising from the darker
striated bark of the sweetgum.
In the galaxies pooling in the waiting room
where black holes hum the prelude
to creation
we chart the shushed diagnosis
embossed in the orbit of
the body’s forgotten comets.