Jaramillo kept a picture in his wallet of Borges and him, a picture taken on a rainy black-and-white Bogotá afternoon. The young man and the old, the lover and the master. That must have been his proudest moment, for the grin with which he shared it with me could never match the pictured grin. I thought them beautiful; I thought Bogotá beautiful and mine for a moment. What does it mean to meet one’s hero? What thoughts must have stilled and then exploded in his head? What fog in the background, fog that led to low and sinister concrete homes that led to mountains.
Jaramillo introduced me to Borges when I was just a college sophomore, a year when the power of the imagination hinted at me but withheld itself.…
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The gray sky looks threatening, and the inflation rate too. “Watch out. Something big is going to happen and soon,” Lloyd says. “I can assure you, Jennifer. A change in the algorithm.” He coughs for emphasis.
She rolls her eyes. She’s good at rolling her eyes. What algorithm is he talking about? Lloyd is not sure exactly, but it’s a big one. It might involve the crypto-currency markets. A lot of clues come from his chirpy birds at the feeder. “Possibly, a calculation regarding the spread of avian flu.” He fumbles with the seed bag.
“Your birds, right, like you own those chickadees,” Jennifer thinks. She helps him install a fresh suet cake in the cage and re-hang it off the eave.
Lloyd waves a finger in the air.…
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Anne always drove too fast. It was after midnight now and the road home was hazy with fog. There were no street lights here in the “old” side of town, just cracked, glowing paint, and the occasional rusted railing reminding you where the cliffs were. Anne had been staying later and later at the shop since she started working there, preferring its armchairs and views of downtown to the quiet and dark of her own apartment. Anne yawned, keeping her eyes dead ahead where her high beams bounced off of the fog, her eyes burned with concentration and tiredness. A burst of dark brown fur rushed into view and Anne slammed on the breaks.
The deer stared at Anne, nostrils flared and eyes shining in the darkness.…
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– Onry
Author’s Note: “Livin’ in the Light” is a video of a song I wrote about my experience singing in Portland during quarantine and at civil rights protests as one of the only Black male opera singers in the Pacific Northwest.…
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Long before desire benched the boy
I was and took the field, we escaped
baking in our old brick oven
those summer nights, when Pops
ran a cord to the porch window,
so we could sit listening to katydid shrieks
compete with buzzing ballpark fans peppered
by vendors’ hawking cold beer and peanuts,
as fireflies signaled heater, deuce.…
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The ambient light goes out and laughter followed it. On the end table, the alarm clock glows at a quarter past three. His bedroom is pitch black without the television. He rolls over and looks at the darkness. The covers are thrown off him so he can get up. He pushes out the bed, finding his houseshoes by feet, and fists the handgun.
Garbage pick-up is today at daybreak. And after three weeks of procrastination, that sucker is full and it needs taken out. The trashcan does not have any more room for another lazy week. So he closes the backdoor behind him, triggering the floodlights. He walks through and beyond the garage to look up to find the night sky noticeably vacant. It is as if the moon and stars withdrew.…
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You can’t have sex today. It is the first thing you think when you wake up. It is heavy in the linings of your lungs as you stretch in your twin-sized bed closer towards him. Morning has been pouring into the room for hours and it is getting almost too late to stay in bed, but you stay. You are tired.
There’s no reason to keep him around if you can’t have sex with him, if he means nothing. But you argue, trace the bones down towards his wrist, and correct yourself. He means something; you just wish it was less. You curl into what the twin-sized bed has allowed you to call comfortable and his hand rubs up and down your thigh innocent enough for you to stay.…
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