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The emergency goes on, but no one believes her about it anymore. Mary waits in the ER waiting room every Thursday from noon—the elementary school’s early release hour—until the end of her mom’s shift at the coffee cart, one floor up. Knowing no nurse will call her name, hoping to be surprised. Today, the room begins empty as her stomach but fills with anxious chatter in the
If you’re wearing a tee we would call vintage nowadaysperhaps with a pop star or soda brand brandishedacross the chest, waiting with your brother-in-lawfor your brother at a bench in the park in whichyou two will sleep, huddling together for warmth and to shoo away thoughts of permanent disappearance, you must be my father in Ciudad Acuña in 1991.When the police shake you two
Only way is to fucklike you’re stallingthe body’s departurefrom doingwhat bodies will do:end. Call it backfrom its routeto extinction.Tetherit to its ownunderbelly, the landof living. Speakits basement desire.If you can do that,well, thenyou’ve done a thing.Young sex misunderstands metaphor.To the young, the dying of the light, is mere abstraction. Light is not light.
Another name for nostalgia, some kind of traffic from yesterday, the way an argument finds a nerve you didn’t think could exist, the hymn for a religion of ash and cloud. I fell in love with a river that dried up at the foot of a tree. I didn’t know the ax I held was made from the wood of its offspring, didn’t know I could earn grief so easily without forgiveness. I always
I watered a wilting succulent. The sun had begun to disappear behind the apartments across the street. Afternoon turning quickly into evening. Soon night. In the oven, sweet potatoes roasted on one rack,brussels sprouts on the other. By the windowpalo santo burned. Books