While Christmas shopping one December almost twenty years ago, I chanced upon a cute tin with a beaming Santa and one word, COAL, on its cover. Curious, I opened the tin, and there, nestled inside, was a single, honest-to-goodness lump of coal. I did not hesitate. I threw that tin into my basket and headed for the register. Then I spent far too much time in the days before that Christmas pondering and calculating: Who was the most deserving recipient of the COAL that year? You see, the COAL tradition in our family was new to us that year, but it follows the old coal-in-the-stocking tradition that most of us have heard of, if not been threatened with. It will likely surprise no one that the year I bought the COAL, two of my three children were teenagers.…
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I just got word. My elementary school’s scheduled for demolition tomorrow. It’s a devastating announcement. Something doesn’t sit right with deliberately tearing down a building built to educate—to encourage learning. This place was the primary setting of my childhood; now in a matter of hours, it’ll be bulldozed, and all that’ll remain is a pile of dusty rubble over its concrete foundation. It was my foundation too. I’m stunned. That blocky brick building where I pined after my first crushes and learned to read and write. Gone. My childhood, leveled. What becomes of memories once their physical tether’s been removed?
In fourth grade, we had this grueling geology exam where we circled the classroom like vultures, identifying rock samples laid out on desks. I failed it—miserably.…
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Florida Junes sweat you to the bone
Ichetucknee means big water or gift from God
heat like this I don’t know how you wear clothes
I got to sleep naked I got to
swear to God the chinaberry never quits
the cicada radio never quits in Florida Junes
crape myrtles pop their one trick
pink petals and paper buds die midair
Nature is a one trick pony if you ask me
Skylar slips off her aqua kimono…
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Metaphysics
One of the things I do is think of scenarios that would make you unattractive to me. It makes this life I’m in, the one where I love you, more bearable.
You don’t suffer in these imaginings, you merely transform in one way or another in your sleep and wake to be a different you, a you I can treat normally. I fear the descriptions of these transformations you’d find offensive and insensitive, since most often they are of an aesthetic nature, exposing my simplicity and lack of nuance. I’ve never been able to find beauty in the grotesque, for instance.
But your capacity to empathize with a variety of types is a quality I’ve always admired. Sometimes, in my scenarios, you wake without this quality.…
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The ocean dries up when I touch it. Fish and algae disintegrate; every drop of salt water seeps into sand. Emoto says it’s my negative energy, that the waves would rather go bare than be exposed to me. I don’t know the ocean’s feelings. And it doesn’t care to know mine: I’ve given up looking for my notice of its departure. All I know is the little girl inside me, and the apologies I keep giving her. I write sorries in handwriting she doesn’t know as her own. I’m a stranger to her now. Her tiered dresses hang dusty in my closet, gray around the seams. The mole on my forehead mirrors hers, and, to her disappointment, the scar on her fingertip still hasn’t faded. I try to tell her about the science of nostalgia, about sensory stimuli and chronological remoteness.…
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The woman did not survive but the child did; her fall was cushioned by the body of her godmother, who hit the ground first. The young godmother, frozen in flight, knows exactly what is happening—her arms are extended as if they could possibly break her fall—the baby, upright but looking down in disbelief as the disassembling fire escape cascades alongside them, a collage of iron fragments racing them to earth, potted plants in accompaniment. Smoke can be seen creeping and curling like fog over the edge of the rooftop.
I had first seen the photograph—really a series of photographs: the photographer was using his motor drive—while in college, in a class called “Media and Memory” or something very like it. It fulfilled my second history requirement.…
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I didn’t hear the thunder. I may have felt it, swelling in air and buffeting close to me. Saw skies, shades of grey and purple, colors of bruises healing. I lay on my back, seagrass wisping dryly over me. Waves broke behind where I lay, spray hazing over skin, numbing me with cold. I couldn’t pinpoint the pain. It seemed centred on a hip as if I’d dislocated a bone. Scents of brine floated across me as if someone held smelling salts under my nose. I couldn’t move.
“Are you okay?” she said next to me. “Thought you were dead. My boyfriend’s calling an ambulance.” She bent down, gusting wind layering hair like bandages over her face.
I’d noticed it coming. The freshly turned earth smells, odor of downpours on steaming ground, rain angling, swishing through leaves and across bitumen roads radiating the day’s heat.…
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