The Bookends Review

Another day, another mass shooting.
Another day, another mass shooting.
At 4 am, baby kicks me awake,
and I read about the latest in El Paso, Texas
and Dayton, Ohio.
A witness describes a six month old
swaddled in blood.

I am due in thirteen days.
Yesterday morning, I wished
he would come.
Now I want him to wait.
I will stay inside the house.
He can stay inside me.

– Francine Rubin… ...continue reading

I remember the moment when I began hating my music. I’d stood with an acoustic guitar off to one side of the lead vocalist. Sporadic hand-clapping rippled from the audience. The hotel half-filled. Couples mostly. The band glanced around at each other. A song with lyrics I wrote years ago started. Lyrics used to come to me back then, the way some people describe visions. One second my fingertips tapping to tunes the band gave me like heartbeats in a small animal. Then I’d write the words in crooked lines across paper. Later I sang them inside rooms, lyrics and guitar throbbing dully off walls.  

Something fell out of me that night. I played on, strings blunt under fingers. The band continued, at times their eyes half-closed as if mesmerised by the surges of music.… ...continue reading

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.… ...continue reading

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.… ...continue reading

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… ...continue reading

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.… ...continue reading

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.… ...continue reading