Krish Dhar scrunched into his window seat on the cramped Air Canada jet. His business required travel from Southern California to Phoenix eight times a year. The return flight took roughly seventy-five minutes. Easy most trips. A good chance to stare into space and mull over things.
Krish watched attractive women board the plane and manage the slim passageway. A brief juncture of hope, of possibility. For whatever reason, they were never ticketed next to him. No, he consistently endured giant, long-legged fellows as neighbors, or sweaty, glandular men who needed the auxiliary seat belt strap to secure them from careening about the cabin. If a woman ever sat next to Krish, it was a besieged mother wrestling with a mewling infant who smelled of soiled diapers and Gerber’s baby food.…
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for Bruce
We have lived long enough in this house
to have filled it to bursting
with all we no longer need,
long enough
that the silver on the back of the bathroom mirror
has begun to flake away with age.
I don’t really mind that it’s flawed,
like so much else,
but you find a mirror to replace it
and ask my help to take the old one down.
It leaves a mirror-shaped blank
on the bathroom wall
over the sink where we taught our daughters
to wash their hands and brush their teeth.
Then you bring in the new mirror,
pristine, unaged,
and I help you hoist it,
our two faces looking grimly back at us again
as we measure to be sure it’s even
and fasten it in place. …
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A twenty-nine-year-old photo of Charlie Company hangs on the wall in my basement. We’re standing at attention in rows on aluminum bleachers wearing our pristine tropical blue dress uniforms; the standard shot for Coast Guard recruits who’re about to complete basic training. Our Company Commander, a stout muscular black man with mirrored sunglasses, stands dead center in front of his platoon—and the gender disparity is chilling. Three female recruits survived the eight-week-long training session. They’re easy to single out due to their covers because they’re a lot different than the men’s, which civilians often mistook for old-time bus drivers’ caps.
In the last week of June 1991, ten or so women arrived at Coast Guard Training Center Cape May New Jersey. They filed off the buses with duffle bags in hand like the rest of us, eager to become part of the world’s most elite maritime service.…
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I read that once in a while one must look
up into the tree branches & glimpse the stars
scrawled on the leaves’ pale underbellies.
The book says the ocean eats itself everyday,
coral & nematodes clinging to each other
against the scraping teeth of wave on wave.
I must live the life of the aesthetic
fortune reader, tea leaves for breakfast,
clamshells before bedtime, a silken shawl
on my shoulders to draw to myself
when the ghost in the fireplace howls.
The book taught me love must grow
in the damp places of the earth, mold
& mushrooms spreading out in rings,
spirals of moist heat, bugs crawling
upwards to find the sun, a million writhing
things pushing up through the loam & rot,
with nutrients in their mouths
& love escaping from their breath.…
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One day, God-With-Us and his groupies pulled into a small town and stopped at On Higher Grounds, a local church-run coffee shop where community leaders gathered each day to sit alone and stare at their screens. God-With-Us took James and John inside for a chai latte. When they came out, he found his other groupies bickering with some of the regular patrons.
He asked what started the squabble and a man stepped forward, saying, “Teacher, that young man there is my son. He has an attitude of bigotry which robs him of all civilized speech.”
The young man in question was sitting at an outdoor table, sipping a doppio and typing furiously on his laptop. Outwardly, he was as quiet, well-groomed, and respectable as any other customer, but online, he was nasty and vindictive and no one could silence him.…
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The first sermon at the first church I ever served (which is also the only church I have served) was called “Swimming Lessons.” Countless seminary papers and exams had brought me to this moment. Now, time had come to climb into the pulpit to impart the great wisdom available to a young man with a Divinity degree on his wall.
Here’s the gist: as a swimmer learns to trust that water will hold a body, so, too, must a person learn to trust in the Holy. Have you attended any church in the world for, say, four or five Sundays? If so, you yourself will have heard a take on this very same sermon. It’s like arguing that people should remember to floss when they brush.…
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I bring a newspaper to act as talking stick.
The back page stows away a story about
the imaginary future of capitalism
and its artifacts. Photos of oil cans
and fluted orchids graze inside copy.
The question I pose to the students is:
What’s inside your shrine? I pass the stick
around the circle. Deafening silence.
Not since a question on self-identity has such
an iron curtain of reticence taken hold.
The talking stick returns to me as wrinkled
as a shorn Shar-Pei. “Okay,” I acquiesce.
“I’ll add a few relics to mine.” They’re
as familiar as dying embers slumming
in my right ear.…
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