Christmas 1990, my dad bought me a Nintendo. My dad, who was freshly divorced from my mom, was down in Florida visiting. We had just moved from Chicago six months before. I was five at the time, so of course I didn’t understand how much my mom disliked that he was there. My theory is that he showed up uninvited but was allowed to stay when my mom saw how excited her children were to see him.
Even though by 1990, the Nintendo had been out in the US for five years, my siblings and I marveled at the video game console like it was a brand-new invention. It was a gift from my dad, a person that we had moved away from, and that I suddenly wasn’t allowed to see any more for reasons I didn’t understand, so I coveted it like it was plated in gold.…
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The air for months
an apocalyptic blanket,
jaundiced shimmer from stones and dirt.
How does your
world end? A pandemic
for real next time,
wet bulb temps settling
along your latitude sooner than expected,
a decade from now or three?
Do you require
global holocaust, or is a burnt town, town
by town
enough? How far away is Talent, Oregon
Paradise, California. How near
is here it is. We walk outside breathing
ash, breathing bone, sucking whatever
we can into lungs, thick greasy air
enshawling our shoulders,
robes we’ll be wearing till
the end.
– Claudia Putnam
Author’s Note: “Raiment” is part of a chapbook MS composed at Hypatia-in-the-Woods in 2021.…
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The leaky ceiling at the restaurant was nicknamed the fountain by the staff, and when the owner overheard them he called it brilliant. He put seats around the bucket and declared it a contemplative experience.
Here’s the thing, he said. Water and air are the simplest elements in our universe. You yourself are 80% water and 10% air. That is why, as you watch the waterfall through the air, you can contemplate yourself and reality at a deeper level than you ever could before.
The entire staff thought he was crazy until people paid double to sit in the contemplation circle. Only one girl piped up and still called it a leak, but he fired her and threatened to sue her into the ground.
It became the contemplation fountain.…
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She visits the playground almost every day. A lone swing stirs, and she knows it for what it is: a sign from her son that he’s still here, maybe not so that she can touch skin-to-skin, maybe not so she can breathe in tuna fish, sweat, and red licorice, but not gone either.
Once the playground was a vibrant place, crammed full of parked strollers and bags of Cheerios. Her son darted from the swing set to the sandbox to the covered green plastic slide that curved into a sudden drop. The other children grew up, started driving, went to college or work. The new crop of parents, calling the playground a death trap, petitioned for a safer area for their children, a place away from the woods, a place with rounded edges and soft landings.…
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Because I am a small person, olive-skinned, female and not old but not young, more senora than senorita, I am accepted in places white men my age are not. Not because I am blessed, mind, but because I do not matter much. I am invisible. I feel reasonably safe and secure here because it is no different from the neighborhoods I grew up in. Also, because I am walking a pit bull with fantastic teeth and lolling tongue, whom no one else knows to be a pussy cat, happy to lick the hand of anyone, good or bad, who holds out treats.
“Good dog,” I tell her, as we pass a gaggle of men and women holding court on the sidewalk. All are wearing masks, I am not.…
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Of course, she would never smoke weed. Not at work at least. Nor did she vape. No. At work, she was more than content with classic Marlboro reds. Tobacco laws prohibited her from buying them herself, so she smoked them sparingly. She made sure to thoroughly enjoy every puff. She wasn’t addicted. Cigarettes were great but never a necessity. She didn’t crave the nicotine. She craved the silence.
Just being able to get away from the chaos of the store for five minutes was the whole reason she had started smoking. In an ironic twist, the cigarettes helped her remember to breathe. It was like a cancerous meditation. Most nights she didn’t ask for a smoke. After all, she was down to three cigarettes. However, tonight had been one of those nights where five to ten minutes in the alley alone would save her entire evening.…
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Dark. Driving the country road on the way home to the city from her daughter’s, there was the county fair: Ferris Wheel, Tilt a Whirl, Fun House, lights a riotous invasion of a farm field.
Her daughter had told me she was pregnant again. Two children in two years. She didn’t need three. She had a part-time job as a bank teller. Her husband drove a delivery truck. They grew their own vegetables, cut their own hair.
Her daughter wanted her to move in with them before the new baby, be a babysitter, be with family as she got old, add her social security to what they had. Better for everyone, her daughter said. There was a little shack behind the run-down farmhouse. It has potential, her daughter said.…
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