She would have been ninety-six at the end of January. Her name was Evangeline, but most people called her Ann. She lived in Paris for a year, working for Anne Klein as a fashion designer. She studied maritime law in the 70s, the only woman in her class and the program. She made most of her money by working as a set designer for two male fashion photographers. She returned to school in her thirties and began teaching middle and high school science courses. Geology was her favorite.
It was one of those old-fashioned public phone booths that were so common before mobiles. He was grateful to have spotted it because this way she wouldn’t recognize his number. He fed the slot several coins and shivered in the autumn air as he dialed.
He felt that familiar rush of adrenalin that came from anticipating her mood. She picked up on the second ring.
Yeah, it was my niece’s fifth birthday party, and you paid him five bucks. He seemed pretty surprised it worked and started losing his shit. You laughed and put me in your shirt
The trees should have withered months ago, but everything is too green. I walk the dog past a magnolia on our morning route and find one last leaf still attached to its branch. I tell the dog to growl at it, as if she can intimidate the leaf into a timely death. As if this can fix an eighty-degree day in November, or last week’s brushfire in the middle of Prospect Park. The dog pisses on a mess of roots and blinks past me with whale eyes. I follow her gaze to the branches and see them: buds. Magnolia buds. Creamy white and six months early, premature mouths gulping the air.
Once there was a door that opened to you, and your grandmother stood behind it. Loud voices and warm light spilled messily from behind her while you and your sister shivered in the jagged Chicago cold. Overjoyed to see you on her worn front stoop, returned from the inhospitable East Coast, she ushered you in. In her excitement, she slammed the door in your parents’ faces, shouting, “The girls are here!” Your grandfather ambled down threadbare carpeted stairs that had weathered six pounding sets of his children’s feet. Smelling of cigarette smoke, peering through
The scent of my childhood is irises and dogshit. Metallic like wire and blood from splinters. A dry dust that coats the nostrils, leaves tissue black.
The childhood of my friends smells different. Sweet like candy and attentive parents. I notice their fences are just for animals like pigs and horses, and I wonder if they can smell the fear in me.
Jenny’s mom thinks I’m too polite and therefore insincere. I worry they can smell the
In the summer of 2018, my then-wife and I spent a weekend in the beautiful “village” of Alfama. We rented what I can only describe as a cavern of a studio in what would become my most favorite part of the city. The apartamento was ridiculously small, with only one window and a bed pushed into a cave-like opening against the wall. It was tight and hot and absolutely perfect.
The war went on. After each battle, the casualties were laid side by side beside the pit. Their handlers, the men who had fetched them from the field and medic’s station, rested on the mound of dirt exhumed from the pit, smoking cigarettes, choking on stale biscuits. Sewn inside their canvas coffins, the casualties looked like a regiment of bedrolls.
When we woke up, everywhere we looked, parachutes. Pierced on church steeples, crumpled in meadows. Cast over roof gutters and laid bristling against treetops. They sagged from branches like the carcasses of ghosts.
Grief, at its heart, is a question.
What could I have done differently?
Why why why why why why why why why why why?
At Christmas, am I still supposed to cook the carrots with horseradish that no one else eats?
Or, rather, grief is many questions tumbling on top of one another.
The leak started when they were sitting on the couch: Frank reading the paper, Martha knitting, the radio playing a song they had danced to once, though neither could quite remember where. The ceiling opened and spilled right onto the cushion between them, and they turned to watch it pour.
If the world ends in fire, my family will survive. Here’s the truth: after the house burned down, I was restless for twenty moons and filled with more shame than the prosecuted. The guilt was too massive for my eleven-year-old body to carry, but I stored it in the pit of my stomach for five years.
The moon has a face, but it is not one of a man.
The moon is a mujer, a woman.
I see her clearly for the first time in years of orbiting me. Two eyes. One nose. One pair of slightly parted lips. She rises quietly over the trees in Jay Ramirez’s yard and I perceive her.
Tilted back in her recliner, Rachel’s mother has the look of a petulant child. Feet up, arms crossed. Pouting.
Rachel closes her eyes, exhales long. She swallows her impatience, her anger, and reminds her mother what the doctor said. “If your blood sugar’s too high, you won’t heal.”
Her mother makes a face. “A couple pieces of candy aren’t going to kill me,” she spits.
only there is no guest, just you and this empty seat where your wife should have been and a pink-haired woman bunched into the window seat, eyes shut, lips moving as the jet’s engines rumble and thrum. Your wife would have small-talked her, showed her the funny picture of your son and the grandkids—tongues out, eyes crossed—
All you need to do is marry some decent boy and settle down, is what my father told me every time I asked about college. There are no decent boys in this town, is what I’d answer. Then he’d call me ungrateful. Then I’d slam the door to my room, the tiniest space in the house—more an oversized closet than a real bedroom
I’m supposed to go straight from my cell to the return room, but I grit my teeth and etch my poem into the concrete walls of the clone factory. Someone, at some time, will read these poems and know that I too questioned my role. My latest one reads: Would we all just be machines/ if we couldn’t do bad things/ on purpose.
Eventually the house was going to fall into the sea—just pitch right over and tumble down the bluff. That was why it was cheap. Why they could afford it.
Their realtor said it was nothing to be concerned about. That was years away, he said. It probably wouldn’t happen at all.
Our only child has transformed into a starfish. They called it a compulsion, then a desire. Limb by limb, eye by eye, they replaced the body we gave them. Is this worse than puberty? I can’t ask. Our child speaks starfish now: chemical excretions and spindly touch. I am as ignorant and useless as they swore in their youth I was.
The gourd appeared three days after my miscarriage. Its massive body, swollen and puckered with warty growths, stretched from one end of the butcher’s block to the other. Bulbous and green with a light-yellow underbelly, it sat there in the center of the room unbothered by its own mysterious appearance in the household.
Nothing about the 32-pound gourd made sense.
Some time, before we noticed it, Ah Ma had started renovating our cramped one-bedroom apartment into rows of cardboard boxes, boxes she got from buying canned beans, jars of spicy bamboo shoots, packs of Long Life noodles, because Ah Ma never buys just one thing at a time, that’s cheap and lonely, and we’re neither, instead, she buys things in double at least…
We packed an ice chest and drove from civilization to a grave. We drove forty-five minutes to a sea in the middle of the desert. You said the Salton Sea was a mistake—an engineering failure that caused the Colorado River to flood the Imperial Valley in 1905. But the mistake seemed a blessing in disguise.
I enter the Gaza Strip weekly, my routine the same: cross the border, get settled into my office, and then walk around the corner to purchase fruit and vegetables for the week from Abu Emad‘s market. In my 5 years in Palestine, I have become a regular at this market.
Here in the grotto, we whisper like sinners sipping on wine stolen from a stocked cabinet or an under-staffed supermarket with broken cameras—ours for the taking. Our secrets are coated in fermented, besotted grape juice, brains buzzing and swollen against our skulls, the rest of us just as desperate to be free.
Midday, standing on the gray, vinyl floor of his small kitchen in Chicago’s West Side, Ozzie took a can of sardines from the cabinet and pried open the top. His flannel robe hung loose, exposing gnarled blue veins running down his legs. He stood motionless as he stared into the tin.
Before curfew, Friend Bar is a G.I. hangout. After curfew, it belongs to us, the expats. We think of it as our private after-hours dive tucked away on the second floor of a broken-down building in a seedy part of Seoul.
Four girls in five years, wow, did you plan that? Do they all have the same father? Are you going to try for a boy? Have you figured out where babies come from?
She’ll be dead that evening, but neither of them knows this. In her final moments, as the car flips over, she will not think of him but of her parents, of how she would give anything to spare them the pain they are about to experience.
The neighbor had a few trees removed, and they had to leave the trunks out on the lawn overnight. The sun went down, or the truck was full, or else I guess they maybe just needed a break. They were ash trees, I think. . .
The first time it really hit her, Rosa was in her teens.
The children were spending their summer vacation at the sprawling García ranch at the foot of the sierras, and on a particularly hot afternoon, she had gone bareback riding with Soledad, while the rest of the kids stayed behind playing children’s games. Daring each other, they ran the horses hard and far from the house. . .
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