Mother’s grief unfurled slowly, like paint blistering and peeling from the shed out back. For months after the sirens, she locked herself inside with our photo albums. She taped pink-stickered pages of ultrasounds and baby-shower smiles to the walls until daylight thinned and mosquitoes came out.
The teller at Banco de Oro called me Coco, even though my ID said Conrado. He never once looked down at the card. My father called me Conrado whenever he rang to ask for money. I wired fifteen thousand pesos to the Dinagat slums on the first of every month for seventy-two months to keep him alive. All he left was forty-three loose coins in a Nescafé tin and a smell that had not worked out he was gone yet.
All at once nothing was happening. Over the past three days Paige had grown more distressed by the hour. Now, his wife’s steady breathing soothed his thoughts. Lennox was usually anxious about something. A late-night talk radio host, his introspective style was sometimes referred to as new masculinity, which made him anxious.
Grubby little kids knocking on doors, begging for candy. He turned off his porch light, Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do? They came anyway. Ringing the doorbell. Banging on the door. Interrupting his television. They disturbed his cat, Sam. The old tom yowled from the couch, a sharp, throaty complaint.
We know naked. We've done naked for a living. But tonight we are washing you. Tonight we are saying goodbye. We can’t be there tomorrow, on those hard wooden pews, in the church your family chose. But we can be here tonight, with the women you called sisters.
You spin so slowly it defies all cosmic traffic laws— a stubborn, beautiful marble refusing to rush. The rest of the universe is sweating on a treadmill, zipping through years like breezy calendars.
You wanted to express oil from the sea glass washed ashore at Sete, and pluck unripen oranges from the trespassed orchard outside Beziers, and spank the children building castles along Cote d’Or.
Infinity is finite to the gods. They skip among stars like children at recess, play frisbee with comets while we crawl the difficult inches toward our own demise.
Denver to San Francisco in a 1978 gray Toyota SR5, handed down from my sister, Michael Jackson probably at his peak, me ready for a divorce. A credit card. Maybe fifty dollars. No plans but west.
She’s upset because she killed her seedlings by planting them upside down, which sounds like a stoner thing to do when you’re outside tearing earth
Instant as Movement and momentum - Seeking alms from villagers, Shirking the world for the Sake of the Real - to Surrender care for Tomorrow, to Make humble-true Plain flesh.
I was in Tadros Ink in the Old Town getting my obligatory pilgrim’s tattoo when Nietzsche called to tell me God was dead. “This is not a good time for such news,” I said, fumbling to operate the phone with my left hand while the tattoo artist worked on my right forearm.
Happy Anniversary, darling. He kisses her cheek and hands her a paper cut-out of a man and woman, their hands linked. She sticks it on the fridge door. Hours later, as she watches his dinner burn, she notices a small rip in the woman.
Pretty set of pearl gnashers on her. Blonde ponytail, magazine makeup. Sheffield dentists int what they was. ‘Does yer gerra discount?’ I asks. Frowns, denting her smooth brow.