I was not born in these kinds of waters
but I came to believe and to canoe away
on the river of silty glass
bugs skating the surface
sunlight pouring into me
laughter echoing off the empty
voices raised, poles poised, fish fleeing upstream even.
I stare at my cell phone in a sick state of disbelief. I had missed Justin’s one call. He left a message that I play again, hoping it’s not real.
“Mom, how did I get here?”
I hit stop unable to listen to it in its entirety.
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
I’m not sure I can do this anymore, being privy to his suffering and the hell he lives in. It’s too hard. But I am the one he needs; the one he reaches out to, his mother. I know that if I abandon him he won’t survive.
I am going to pay a man
to stand by my car
and protect it
from the nomadic thieves
of the grid deserts,
the car I dreamed about
when I was a child
when I was unemployed
when I was weeping
in small painted rooms
with my hands in a ring.
Miss Dinuzzio and I sat catty-corner in snug armchairs with three stacked nesting tables between us. She removed the glass bowl from the tabletop tattooed with faded cup rings.
“Do you have any questions?”
“Nope. I think I’m okay.” The job was straightforward. I would step in as Mother’s companion, so Miss Dinuzzio could teach her Saturday morning piano lessons in peace.
Kids, when I cut out of this life,
don’t turn on the tears and grieve;
kids, when I die I don’t want
any golden speeches saying kind things
about me or some windbag sniveling about
death’s sting, God’s grace and
the triumphant rise to heaven.
The room is dark; a large queen-sized bed sits in its center. The Old Man who occupies it is propped up on a pile of pillows, the skin on his cheeks sagging like so many yards of curtain valance; his eyelids lowered to half-mast; his mouth yapping up and down like a marionette puppet whose strings have been pulled by too many hands.
Rain drips from the awning, the constant patter, late December up north you get snow, late December down south you get rain. Strings of red and green bulbs hang zig-zagged over the dark and puddled road. Think fog and mist and shadows. Think gaseous orange sky and shrill nameless voices and the strange feeling, because it’s a feeling after all, not a thought nor a string of contemplation, but a feeling of imminence cast out by the damp air and prickling the skin’s hairs; a foreboding,…
Quietly and swiftly the canoe marked its early morning passing with an undulating seamless wake on the surface of the water. With no breeze the small lake was motionless except for the temporary trail left by the canoe. In the distance belted kingfishers and alder flycatchers darted above, and the cry of a bald eagle from a tree at lakeside occasionally pierced the morning stillness.
The weather is cold and sleety when André Deutsch picks up his briefcase full of cash and heads for the UGIF office. Mondays are always a trial for him. On those days (allotment days) he has to lug up to 30,000 francs through Old Lyon with its medieval streets and narrow soot-stained buildings. André has never been especially brave (he was a yeshiva boy, an easy target for the roughnecks in his town of Borsec), but walking alone through this part of the city has never been safe. There are simply too many traboules.
“I’m chock full of cancer,” said Mrs Winston, sat in Patty’s salon.
“I’m sorry to hear that Mrs Winston.”
“Agony it is.”
“Some cancers aren’t so bad though, are they, these days?”
“Who told you that?”
Trey had a friend. People said she was going to die. Trey visited her friend after work and sat on a bean bag, consoling her with optimistic words and cups of tea. The cancer had a name similar to Trey’s maths teacher, Mr Hodgkins. The cancer came and went. Her friend recovered. Trey felt she had been misled.
My mother and her sisters have been waiting for their Aunt Del to pass on for at least ten years now. “It’s no way for someone to live,” Mom would tsk-tsk upon returning from a visit to “the home.” Funny we call it “a home” when it sounds like it’s anything but. I have never met Aunt Del, so when I offered to accompany Mom to the funeral service, she was surprised. She certainly didn’t need my support.
The ranchers in the Flint Hills called it a controlled burn, insinuating that with sufficient intention they could master the elements. But Rebecca knew better—an unexpected change of the wind, a jumped fireguard, the barest instant of carelessness, and the ravenous pasture fires set in the region each spring could reduce such smugness to nothing but ashes. Her earliest memory was of fire; her earliest loss was to fire; fire had forged her, for better or worse, into the person she was.
Summary: The titular character is faced with a reversal of fortune in almost every way: he loses a steady job, faces illness and disability, fails in his new marriage, and is betrayed by his closest compadre. He must confront his years of terrible parenting decisions and broken family ties after he is compelled to leave the green valley of San Luis, living as an outcast in the “steel city” of Huerfano, Colorado.
At the end of an appropriate period of polite applause, Ryne Blades touched the knot of his tie, adjusted the microphone, and put on his reading glasses. He paused briefly to look out over the assembled freshmen in the campus theater. This was his biggest speech of the year.
1942. A baby girl is born inside a war. From one unfriendly womb to another she goes. It’s like living in a fishbowl: the view is panoramic but the glass won’t give. So it’s she who must. Learning this takes time.
It happens in winter, this birth, this unlikely, uncelebrated event. A winter that so efficiently brands her with its cold, she is never not cold again. So cold that of all the things she might wish to do over, chief among them is to have been born in summer.
It happens in Auschwitz, this birth.
An ice cream parlor with wrought iron chairs and tables had recently opened at Northland, an open-air mall located just across the border from Detroit. Sylvia, a widow in her sixties, had read about the place and told her younger sister Lottie about it. They’d decided to go there after Lottie’s first appointment with Dr. B. Since then, if only for the cheer of the red and white striped walls, the two had stopped in even if Lottie could only swallow a few sips of her float.
I feel forty-six pieces of her
forming inside of me:
Her fingers dig into the underside of my belly
button, and her feet kick ferociously
for freedom.
In this moment, I want to yell for her
to stop searching for a way to escape this haven.
Hello?
You don’t know me; but,
I am so excited to speak with you.
Strangers—
at once the same…but different.
Divided by violence
Splintered and torn from one another
Families…
Friends…
Strangers…
The fish
flops
against
the
table
with its last breaths.
I forget it only “breathes” in water,
but just the same…
in my homeland little girls and
grandmothers are knotted with silk-threads
called stories
grandmothers walk nimble-footed
to the past, careful not to fall into
memory’s ditch
little girls traipse on it, tumbling
on fantasy and sport, daring
to dream
Some move through the deeper pool
without stopping while others
pause to gather strength
for the shallows ahead.
Those that make it over
the gauntlet of stones buried
by water that would not wet
a cuff thrashing their tails
mightily making waves
Rose oil, sandalwood
and lavender—poured over
honeycomb piles deep in
rumbling woods. Bare feet
missing twigs, silence heard
but for birds, and low hums of
red earth.
Cacophony of instruments rudely disrupt the silence in my ears &
claim the space as their own to live and thrive. First, the saxophone
with its tang & pang & variety & what is. Piano, forte, mezzopiano
repeat. The tongue pitter patters on the mouthpiece, embouchure tightening
its hold, showing no signs of regression yet soft and silky.
The house tucked back
So you’d never
See its entirety unless
You were on the towpath
Which was exactly where
She was trying to drop
Those last twenty-five she’d
Been feverishly struggling to lose