My mother fashioned my hair +++++iinto rows of wheat. ++++++++++++++++iI am in a plaid button down ++++++++++++++++++++++iand cow girl boots– ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++this is the year +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++iiI will declare my All-American heritage: +++++ino more cornrow pleats ++++++++++++++++ior Southern meals. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Today I am not my accent +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++iior choice of meal. I am a black stain +++++ion a white […]
Yesterday, a man walking his monkey on a leash kissed my cheek offered sweet potato ice cream. A flavor I’ve never tried. This note— Please burn your bread at the right toaster. Temple sign teaches what to say before I cross the bridge: careful of the footing because the responsibility cannot be assumed about the […]
You park in front of the restaurant where you’d agreed to rendezvous. You met him on the plane. How often such chats filled the space of the hours of flight, sometimes against your will, sometimes with it. You weren’t the one who started the conversation. It was almost never you. It was the man on […]
In 1962 my parents packed four suitcases, one gray trunk with a brass lock, my stereo, my tennis racket (remnant of happier days and therefore a sign of their hope for my future), and me into our white Lincoln Continental. We headed up Route 301 to the University of Florida campus in Gainesville three hundred […]
“Do you like Jerry Lewis?” I ask the stranger next to me in a movie theater. We’ve been making small talk, waiting for the movie to begin, about films and directors, young and old. The conversation has just turned to comedians, and I thought, there’s my cue. She tilts her blonde head. “He’s not my […]
Some years ago—never mind how long precisely “I don’t remember anything that happened to me.” Michael lifts his hands to chest level as if he is about to catch something. He has beautiful hands that make neat stitches on a hem or trace in the air music’s rise and fall. Now they feel the emptiness […]
I know you. You’re a swagger. A badass. Someone who went and got his mettle tested and returned stateside to the tea drinkers and powderpuffs with a chip on his shoulder and ribbons pinned to your chest. The world had got a whole lot smaller while you were at war: one day walking proud, the […]
On Seeing Swans at the Embassy Suites I wasn’t expecting swans. You were partial to dark corners oaken Algonquin lounges smoky with cigarettes and specters, stories we spilled across the bar, but that night you offered swans their pearled splendor indelible, dappled promise of what our lives together could have been— long necked beauties swimming […]
Grandma’s Poems: 5. Sex in an Apartment Building “My neighbours make love every night!” I complain, itching to give her all the juicy details. The woman’s moans and the man’s grunts sneak under my quilt stitched with maple leaves of every colour, hop along my penguin and iceberg-adorned pyjamas, wet my skin intoxicated by cheap […]
Find, if you can, the brightest stars— her right shoulder, the toe of her sandaled left foot, one on each of her hips. Her halo has gone out. Stars flicker on and off from her lifted wrist, her right hand raised, index finger linking with thumb, blessing the shining northbound lane. How exhausting to be […]
The Naked Man Naked, I run towards you. I’ve been through a lot but I’m no napalm-girl. There is something dangling between my legs. I’m in my mid-forties and overweight. You watch unmoved as I run in your direction. Try to distill at least a little compassion—some curious, tiny interest in me. Hug me, when […]
Toothpaste, toilet paper, hamburger, ketchup, buns. Five items make a Saturday morning grocery list. My wife rehearses the items with me, face-to-face, asking me to repeat the list. It’s the only way she knows I understand her. When she asks if I understand, I always nod my head. I double check my wallet for money, […]
1. Don’t obsess about the reasons you ended it with him. Of course you could think of reasons but none of them would be true and also all of them would be true. Things like: the way he cut the mushrooms for dinner, one at a time instead of bunching them, irritated you. Things like: […]
I do not know exactly when it was that I first started thinking about him. But if I had to guess, I’d say it was the day I went for ribs with my sister. As we ripped into the moist flesh with our hands, I remember wondering where the pig I was eating had come […]
In trying to reach the other side of whatever separates us—blue expanse or two fingertips inches from bridging— I have become as much an anchorless boat rowed too near the horizon as some great vessel moored a lifetime in the shallows. If I could speak what is missing by silence alone I would have already […]
Translator’s Note: This work represents an attempt at a true bilingual poem. There is no actual translation present. When I attempt to write concurrently in my two native languages, I select wording that transfers well across the cognitive-perceptual filters that languages create (which is something that only multilinguals and linguists can truly grasp). […]
FACT: I am fourteen years old. I already know more than my mother does. She doesn’t drive. She doesn’t work. My mother quit school after eighth grade and went to vocational school. Now she has kids in grade school, junior high, and high school, plus four more at home, three in diapers, cloth diapers. Every […]
Half-dark, extra mild. I pass these words to the cashier standing behind the bulletproof glass. She returns those words to me with a tone change, eyeing my buttoned shirt ironed as crisply as my speech free of twang. Shot through […]
BRÂNCUŞI AND THE BIRD the sculptor puts his hands on the red oak block before him, meant to be woman, eve, but jumps back, acrid scent infusing the plaster workbench ars—dalta-ţi cade din mînă burnt the moment his calloused palms meet the wood. the oak, scarlet […]
“That nurse-girl stole my check blanks.” It’s a conversation starter. I just got here, just sat down in the chair that used to be Grandma’s and we needed a place to start. The nurse comes in on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to check on him and get him to bathe. On Fridays, I show up […]
It wasn’t until sixth grade that I started lying about my mittens. Bright blue and pink, I told my friends that they had been a Christmas gift from my mom. “Nice mittens, man,” they’d say. “I know right,” I’d say laughing, and tuck them into my pocket. The truth was that I’d knit them myself; […]
Death We shrouded Father’s body, which could not wash itself. We carried you to the church where you used to step boldly inside for mass at dawn everyday with your arthritic legs. We carried you all the way to the grave you couldn’t walk to by yourself and laid you carefully inside your home. […]
Here is the street where we shop for ammonium and cabbies deliberate over paper cups. They work the hours of risk from gunshots to breakfast. When a motorcycle manipulates space to crash spectacularly, a woman beyond the circumference of wreckage turns to her man: Why won’t you detonate with me? We are restless, we travel. […]
I’ve worn different races as if they were shades of pantyhose. Many times, they felt just as constricting. They were not always adopted willingly, but sometimes forced on me. I am mixed; my father is white and my mother is an immigrant from El Salvador. But like all children, I started out raceless, like a […]
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