Idiom Idiot
Let’s mince words: growing up, idioms weren’t a piece of pie. I skated on thin eyes spitting phrases steel-tongued, checking squints for slip-ups, trying not to drop the doll in chats. Friends would ask me to spill the frijoles or take Angel’s chisme with a grain of salt and pepper, …
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On the Variations
1. The first time I played Bach on the piano, age eight or nine, I was startled to find how much it soothed me. Soon, I couldn’t bear the stress of my house without the immediate feedback of the piano keys, the press of fingers, the requirement to attend …
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Prayers to the Patron Saint of Lost Things with Mixed Results
When we lost the Z in our Scrabble set, we ruled any N could be turned on its side. This suddenly made possible blizzard, and buzzard. Someone played pizzazz. Soon, every lost thing began to appear. My mother used to tilt her head to the left to read emoticons then …
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Leftover Women
you’re gone & we’re still here firmly rooted to these scuffed floors these ancient rituals: we cord teeth & bitter lemongrass around our waists we wait in little rooms for someone …
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The Breaking
We have drowned a father, sepsis and I. Deny someone water and the body will find disease to fill it with. ∴ It’s always the stomach, bulbous and huge. A cavern holding what would take cupped hands days to fill. …
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Ride
Clumps peel from the void, and cloudy tunnels of light lengthen into one another. Gold dapples my chest. A ray dries my open mouth. I huff dust and ash. Ponds fizz in my lungs. A vein revs over my heart. Angles squirm up my sternum, puff my neck, …
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What I Took
From the ashes of a long marriage, I took the kitchen table we found at a farm auction. He sanded the top to expose heart pine, and I painted the frame and legs. I now use it as a desk. * The settlement agreement was simple, fifty-fifty. …
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The First Poem I Write After My Father Dies
Because my father is dead in the darkness I hear birds. Not the willowy chirps of sparrows, not the clear insistence of cardinals. Instead, I hear him, some de-feathered pulp wailing under the rainy Connecticut skies, some scrap dragged splintery and gasping through its last night on earth. Tomorrow will …
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Sassafras
She was at the kitchen table watching the microwave clock leave midnight. Ron had promised he’d be back by half past eleven. Before he left, he’d said, “I’m too old to be out past my bedtime.” It wasn’t a joke. Nothing about his leaving had been a joke. Her …
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Red Mansions
The blissful resent each moment for ending. This sentiment only partly explains Karim’s decision to stick a skewered kidney through the fly of his jeans and point it at bewildered passersby along the Tonghui River. As a foreign devil, a young Black one no less, he was inured to …
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