The Bookends Review

We live out our lives here in Bogota, as people elsewhere. In the mornings when we wake, we look out at the weather; and we go to our offices and our shops and factories; we go to the cinema and we gossip with and about our friends, we have our lunch-breaks, and in the evenings we come home to our families, those of us who have families. On Sundays we watch soccer and swim in the ponds, we go to Mass and we eat in our favourite restaurants. We have our regrets and pleasures and we fill the city cemeteries.

We know about the stuff that the rest of the world knows about, the stuff about Bogota: the drugs and the gangs, the killings. We know about them, but they happen in the south of the city, in the poor areas, and most of us don’t live there.…

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A big man with a small head steps towards the kerb and puts his hand out. A universal hand gesture, or so you’d think.

However, the driver chooses to ignore him and drive on, his face a pinch of shock as we pass, mere metres apart. There’s no way he didn’t see him, the guy was practically wearing the shelter, and the bus isn’t even half full.

I glance out of the back window and see his portly frame slowly shrinking. He’s still looking our way, hands on hips and head cocked in disbelief as though already mentally compiling the complaint.

It happens again a few days later. Same route, same driver. An elderly woman is hurrying to the stop as fast as her frail legs can carry her.…

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I am a collection, fragile, fine,
A glass menagerie, smooth, divine.
Each curve and edge, a story told,
Of strength in fire, of spirit bold.
Some days I stand, unshaken, tall,
A crystal fortress, never to fall.
The world admires my gleaming light,
Unaware I tremble in the night.
For glass can bear the weight of years,
Yet shatter soft in silent fears.
A breath too harsh, a touch unkind,
And fractures creep through soul and mind.
But oh, how beauty lies within
The way the light plays on my skin.
Each crack a map of where I’ve been,
Each flaw a proof: I’m ‘living’ glass.
So see me strong, yet handle rare,
For I am crafted thin as air.
A sculpture spun from joy and pain
Both unbreakable… and breakable, the same.…

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my fingertips comb the hairs on your thigh,
an evergreen flesh; my lips press upon your chest,
but i must ask,              is this what you need?

my bare shoulder intercepts your blossoming
kiss, and i fear my nakedness offends your loss,
but you insist                          this is what you need.

you aim to forget, for a lustful moment,
how you watched his chest wilt and crumple,
but i still think,                                   is this what you need?

your family members rip dozens of peduncles
from the soil to place in your hand, but you say
that something dead                     is not what you need. 

will my hands, my tongue, my red canna expel
the pathogens from a mind you yourself call warped?
you told me,             this is what you need.…

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Teddy Barnes let his eye roam over the interior of the trailer to make sure all the gear was where it belonged before shutting the double doors and snapping the padlock in place. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his shirt, shook one of the smokes free and lit up. A half-moon hung in the southwest sky and a light breeze stirred. Teddy relished these mid-June nights, cool and quiet after the noise and sweat of the club, so he relaxed while he smoked bathed in the cold white light of the parking lot’s single floodlamp. He was tired, a deep fatigue that followed long nights on the bandstand. He knew he could use some sleep, but at the moment he wanted a drink more.…

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Robert’s voice at the end of the line, at the end of the world, said “an accident.” Molly heard little else. Her brain stuttered, catching only useless details, like “a car,” “coming home,” “no pain.” The fact was that Paul was dead. She hung up in the middle of a sentence.

She stared into the silent living room. Her cat was swatting threads of noon-time sunlight to the mat. Molly watched the dust puff and swirl. Then she began to laugh, a mad cackle that hurt her throat and sent the cat under the couch. Paul had died at ten at night, a far distant Himalayan night, this same day, long hours from now. It was God’s little joke. Paul wasn’t dead, not yet, not here, not for half a day.…

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The palm reader, garbed in a cascaded Romani dress,
red headscarf & golden hoop earrings, took my tired

hands in hers. She whispered, my dress suggests I am
pure, I’m free of illusion &, with your spirit-trust, I’ll see the

trails leading into you. Into all you hide from. I’d found
her accidently, off an old road w/ moss-tongued trees

& a few junked cars, rundown & lost. Two dogs, their
soiled faces peering through fence slots, & a wet garden

of vegetables hard-hit by nibbling rabbits & whitetail deer.
I was a man of blackened branches, looking for what

might have moved in me, had I willed it or wished it so.
She leaned close to me, felt the flexure lines of my hand,

those deltas of tension – longing, remorse, yearning, hurt –
& said that the hand is an un-funneled richness until we,

w/ in a life, create paths upon it that our imagination –
as a genie – creates its freedom & its hard bondage in,

&, by & by, we arrive at it, this truth, like a stunned doe.…

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