The Bookends Review

A wax egg and water

Morning cupola,
I clay.
Shape of a sprout,
My bright canvas
Is a stream, a still.
I am non-tongued, but inner.
I am learning how to breathe as water.

– Anna Smetanenko…

...continue reading

No matter how many times they played the video, I always wanted to yell: The other way! Run the other way, Tyrone! I thought he might get away but never did. I still believed one of the five .40 caliber bullets wouldn’t land in his back, but one always did. Just one.

The forensic pathologist explained how the slug entered, how it ricocheted inside Tyrone Fields’ body and pierced his spine and lung, causing blood to enter his airway before exiting his throat. That’s why the bodycam footage showed him lying paralyzed on the sidewalk, blood trickling from his nostrils and neck, a crimson pool encircling his torso. The pathologist told us that entry wounds are circular because a flying bullet spins so fast it practically burns away the skin, while exit wounds look like tiny incisions, harmless slices where the slug comes out having done its worst.…

...continue reading

My abuela always told me to never go to el valle.

“Mijo,” she said in her tremulous voice. “Please don’t go there. Everyone who goes there never comes back or they come back not quite right.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked her. I was merely entertaining her. I knew she was telling me one of her leyendas. The stories she’d told her own children when they were little so they wouldn’t go outside at night. She held these stories close to her heart and always shared them with me when I visited her. I didn’t mind. I loved hearing her stories and adding my own twists to them in my head.

La llorona transformed into my next-door neighbor who liked to water her garden at night while wearing a pale nightgown, completely unaware of how much she frightened the kids who saw her.…

...continue reading

     I look up, where forgotten things go, saying, after a pause, And a robe of some kind.

     The detective nods. what about his demeanor?

     I look up again, Well, he seemed, I don’t know the word.

     mad? angry? upset?

     Those are the same things.

     sad? depressed? unhappy? heavyhearted?

     Heavyhearted?

     disappointed.

     That’s it.

     he was disappointed? about what?

     About everything. But also me.

     how do you know?

     I could feel it.

     he touched you?

     No. I mean, not like that. He looked at me.…

...continue reading

the etymology of the word illness,
or ill, traces back to the old Norse
word for evil. during her treatment
for cancer, my mother had fevered
dreams of stabbing, of murdering really,
her own waste after they removed
her necrotic colon and fixed a bag
to her hip. a hospital therapist
questioned her and deemed the dreams
suicidal ideation. they strapped her arms
to the bedframe for the remainder of the day.

beauty is that which returns us
to innocence. i admire too much that
which, like a poem, risks its own obscurity.
i drank to avoid dreams and escape the unreal.
which one is ill, and therefore evil,
the affliction or the afflicted? someone
once told me that the eyes, in the dark,
with the eyelids closed, still make
every effort to see.…

...continue reading

Parrot fish circle the grey reef.  These huts can only be reached by boat, the website said, or a fifteen-minute trek through the jungle.  You took the jungle route, you carrying most of the bags, sweeping back the undergrowth with the edge of a waterproof snorkeller’s rucksack so as not to accidentally palm some creeping stinging burrowing thing, and the mosquitoes came like a swarm for your blood.  Touch nothing in the jungle, that’s a rule you’d heard somewhere.  You kept checking back to see if she was okay, struggling with a bag of her own, sweeping the fronds.  You made it, drenched in sweat and bitten half to shit, to this Thai-run hideaway with barely no guests and no English signage, tucked in a cove where the white sands turned to cliffs and canopy. …

...continue reading

Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
― Anthony Bourdain

It’s said that up to 60% of the adult human body is water. We arrive from wombs, are placed in arms, raised in cribs, twin beds, master rooms. We work the sedentary office job, start journals that are left half-empty, live under moons in noisy cities. We fall in love. We fall out of ourselves. We keep walking until our feet touch the sea. And that architecture—that 60% of oceans and rivers and puddles of rain—reminds us that we are made of everything around us. Everything is connected to everything else.…

...continue reading