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 […]
Sun-Min, you all right today, my teacher asked. It could have been any morning during that winter that stung like numbness until late April. It was a little before eight in the morning and barely light outside. Thick grey was on the forecast. On days like that you could taste the air. It was soggy […]
I keep the brown blur in my peripheral vision and trudge up hill, stinking of sweat and Deep Woods Off. A few yards off the trail, the canine dervish whirls her speckled body, thick neck thrashing in the air. She springs high on muscular legs and drops, scraping her face in the dirt, raging to […]
chlorine is one of those smells that reminds me of home and the first time i tried to kill myself how if you were one of those kids and i was whose parents dropped you off at the pool because it was cheaper than summer camp you know an indoor pool is one of those […]
On the morning of her twenty-eighth birthday, nearly six months after the birth of our daughter, my wife Emily forgot how to talk. It was Live-Through-History Day at Crestview Elementary, an invention of my own, and my class of sixth-graders had risen to the occasion. Around the room were icons in miniature: George Washington, Albert […]
and I ate all the sweet potatoes. I’m sorry. The raspberries, the honey, that locket you gave me. They’re gone. I was so hungry. I ate the metronome and the black bear skull we keep on the bookshelf. I ate the books. I ate the empty frame on the wall. And our bed— the mattress […]
“Ten baht each! Fifteen baht for two,” Rehan shouted, standing at one of the busiest intersections in Bangkok. Just like any other boys selling goods on the road, he strode between the cars and motorcycles, pulling his cart. He smiled big; that’s what his dad—God rest his soul—once taught him. Smile—that’s how he sold flowers […]
a child unearths a charm I gave to you. Sand weathered the face of St. Michael into a tarnished silhouette, the vow cut into the silver on the back no longer reads “more than my own life.” A whisper of distorted letters remain as estranged to this child as we are now to each other. […]
in this whiskey bottle sky night the sidewalks purple greased with moon flooded poplar shadows: I walk toward hummingbirds’ wings, the morning green: snapdragons, daffodils trained to bow by an earlier rain: toward the kimono flutters of a water’s edge. John Walser, an associate professor at Marian University in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, holds a […]
Have you ever wondered what it is the moon is doing when it’s up there? Hanging in the night sky? Well, don’t. It’s a silly question. The moon is obviously doing what the rest of us are doing when the sun is down. Sleeping. However, there are nights when the moon can’t sleep. When the […]
I found this perfect song. It’s a sort of jazz-gospel thing I lifted from one of my dad’s playlists, totally not what I’m normally into, but I like the groove. There’s a little organ intro that I use for warm-up stretches, then it slips into this steady beat for ten crazy-long minutes that builds perfectly […]
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