The Many Drafts of My (Writing) Life
I write a short story about Ayatollah Khomeini because his image consumes the front page of The Boston Globe on my hippie teacher’s desk. My teacher reads my writing aloud to my sixth grade class. She tells my parents I should write more stories…My lower-middle-class parents say thank you, proud but a little embarrassed by the small-town attention.
The Lilac and The Housefly: A Tale of Tortured Romanticism
The lilac was unimpressive. Nothing more than a stick jabbed into soil with a price tag tied around the base of its stem, like some sort of prank on a naive consumer. And it worked. I saw the dingy branch and fell in love, sharing the same compassion as Charlie Brown when he bought that pathetic little Christmas Tree. I liked the idea of improving something.
Will for Gala (Testamento para Gala)
We,
lineage of fathers without children,
offer you our empty hands.
— Abraham Guerrero Tenorio
I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard
My father never drank except at Christmastime, I’ve
never seen a brown bottle drain until I was seven, stayed
at my grandmother’s house and knew the skank smell of alcohol, in
winter where cigarette smoke looks ghostly, the
ash tray a black patch of night, he sat on the steps in front
