When my alarm sounds at 5:30 a.m., I am already awake. I lie staring at the ceiling, reaching over to pop the snooze button into silence. I have one hour to go running, then shower before you get here, before Liz wakes up and comes with us to the next round of appointments at the hospital.
At eighteen, she had changed her name to Persephone and tattooed a blooming flower with a leafy stem just below her collarbone, above the location of her heart. It was the size of an apple or a pomegranate, which was slightly too big for the location on her slender frame, but she had done it anyway.
Doreen’s son Alex wants to move back in with her. He’s in a bad way. He’s lost his job. He’s broken off with his girlfriend. Or she’s broken off with him. Whichever. He’s single now and temporarily unemployed. He needs a place to stay. He’s thirty-five years old.
When Billy Stang, four days on the road from upstate New York, forsook Interstate 80 for the two-lane at Ogallala and changed his trajectory from west to north, he was looking for failure. He found it twenty miles east of Alliance; but, since failure was his goal, he saw it as success.
A great blond vista of daffodils rose before us. They looked like stubble, the 5 P.M. stubble on the great big beard of Father Earth. Spring is here, each of them insisted. I was free.
It had to be nearly midnight by now. James couldn’t see his watch between the pouring rain and darkness, but he knew as he ran to Violet’s house that he was close to breaking his promise. Yet again.
Where would you like me to start?
I was born in 1836. I have an older brother, a younger sister, and a younger brother. Another sister passed away very young of the scarlet fever. We were all of us born on the farm that is now Henry’s, over by Ossian Corners.
Milkweed, tumbleweed,
native grasses (unworthy of names, I guess):
the prickly pews above a red clay floor;
my first church was
on the other side of the backyard gate
in childhood.
Cantering after dawn along the Downs,
she pressed her knees and brought him to a walk,
then loosed the reins as if she’d lost her way.
He came to a standstill at the crossing paths.
the body disabled
is most times a cacophonous suite—
moans, a cry, a groan in fortissimos
mounting fading to and from abrupt
weakness
as misguided antibodies
rhythm forward, injure receptors
Some time ago I was like an open palm held out for a reading,
all its lines criss-crossing
and indicating one determined future or another.
I only remember my waking dreams from then,
as if sleep was too close to death
to access the underlayers of my mind
The amount of love I hold for him is absurd.
The human body contains approximately 1.5 gallons of blood,
and at least 1.6 gallons of mine is laced with tiny crystal hearts,
each lit up with pictures of his lopsided grin, his uneven teeth,
and that little freckle dotted on his upper lip
When I shiver with cold at night
I put on the socks of memories
boil a pot of yesterdays
promise my legs with
a blanket of tomorrows
I haven’t had breakfast yet. Ramona said I got up too late. I would have settled for lunch, but it is already past lunch too. There is nothing in the fridge but spoiled onions and a Country Crock tub full of aging pineapple. It hasn’t been cut right so I hurt my teeth on the hard parts. Soft teeth, sensitive. That has always been my main problem, so I’m told. Too sensitive.
A driving rain laced with hail pelted the limo’s roof- making conversation difficult, and so provided a sanctuary of silence as the uniformed driver chauffeured the grieving family out of the city to the hillside cemetery.
Sophia’s husband Joe sat next to the driver, although there was more than enough room in the back, where her son Anthony and his wife Mina sat on either side of her, as if she needed to be propped up like some helpless old lady.
Tony saw it out of the corner of his eye, the official white envelope on the mat. He tried the breathing: slow in, pause, slow out, but it was no good. His chest was as tight as a rubber band.
Either he would want to meet Tony or not. And that was out of Tony’s hands. It should have been easy to pick up the letter, read it.
I’ve had this feeling that someone has been following me, not always the same person, but it’s as if someone or the other has been tracking me like a shadow, throwing furtive glances at me while trying to remain unnoticed, but all the same I have spotted them. Once, just as I looked back and saw a suspicious looking man, he scurried on to a side street. Today, I am sure, it’s that same man sitting to my right, a few benches away.
It was temperate in the sunshine, light fanned from the boughs of tall conifers onto a cream-coloured house, which was once home to a pair of wild cobras, skittling in and out of their hole under its porch. These days, the abbot was the only resident, visited by attendants instead of poisonous snakes. The building itself was unmoving while life grew around it.
Most nights, Izie sheds her clothes as soon as she comes home. She’d shut the door behind her, toss her handbag to a corner of the selfcon apartment and unbutton her suit while kicking off her shoes. Tonight she glances at me instead and marches towards the bathroom, swinging her handbag.
I couldn’t see. The night fog was thick, and I was driving too fast. My guts screamed at me to stop, but I was more frightened of slowing down, knowing that somewhere behind me they were racing to catch us.
I searched for the edge of the road, the line in the middle, anything that would keep me from going off into the dark forest.
Laurent left me in a friend’s garret for the afternoon. We’d moved out of the hotel and into the garret for a few days while the friend vacationed in Normandy and Laurent searched for more stable digs. The friend, a thin man with a thin moustache, seemed nice but a bit odd—many years later there’d be rumors about things that I’d rather not share.
While I stood in a wide-brim hat pondering the habits of Gladiolus “Kirov,” the call to a new life came. I was lost in gardener’s thoughts in the sunshine. As is often the case, I was busy feeling confronted by math as I guessed the number of inches between the “Stella de Oro” daylilies naturalized in my flowerbed. The “Kirovs” would nestle between them.
I first saw Hong Kong from the air, late into the night. It was February 6, 1997. As our plane descended into the vast constellation of varicolored lights, it seemed as if we were landing in a box of sparkling jewels, layers and layers of them. The contrast of dark night and myriad lights further heightened my sense of adventure, adding to the city’s already bold allure.
“I want them to see this,” Mom cries, her body booming through as she hits Dad with a lamp. He, no angel, drags her by the hair from the car where I coil arms around my sister at another violent time. These episodes ignite lifelong trauma. I am now sixty-eight.