Faltu: Meaningless. Without a purpose. Without any promise. Imposed upon. Unwanted. Something that can be got rid of easily. Useless.
Thwackk! The blow was unexpected. Swift. Unnecessary. The blue and white carpet, with its odd, congested geometric pattern, rises up to meet me. I realize with a pang! that they are not flowers. They are just straight lines that criss-cross each other. Why didn’t I notice this before? Why did I think they were flowers? I am suddenly mortified, and then I am flying across the room. My body is a hot spring and a cold glacier melting into each other. The searing pain of contact. Black. Blue. Purple. Nights and days that cross each other off. The pain comes and goes. It travels up.…
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Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, “What? I’m not doing anything.”
At some point, you realize you aren’t waiting anymore for your life to start. Your life’s happening right now, and it’s pretty dull.
– Jade Sharma, Problems
There’s an unspoken yet ubiquitous set of expectations we have for women in an attempt to keep them palatable. They shouldn’t be “too loud” or “too much.” We praise them on their restraint. We associate femininity with being demure. Maya, the narrator of Jade Sharma’s Problems, has freed herself from the shackles of these notions, so much so that her behavior directly upends them: She’s a drug addict. She’s blunt about not loving her husband. She’s unapologetically unfaithful, sleeping with a much older man who doesn’t bother pretending to be interested in her.…
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Names. You’ve got this thing with them. The names of plants, rocks, native species. Concrete details have become a favorite pastime.
Vehicles, clouds, chemical compounds.
You file names away in no particular order but know right where they are when you need them. And you will. Need them.
Architecture, muscles, functions.…
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Hope slips through fingers
like time spent waiting
often just a tick ahead,
visible, but elusive.
Or it hangs back like a stopped clock
no longer viable.
Hope survives fire, preserved
beneath blackened structures
housing every possession.
It resides beneath blankets
of the terminally ill until handfuls of dirt
hit casket lids.
It drips down the sides of chilled
liquor bottles and heroine needles
passing through moments, days, years of addiction.…
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Ever since congress passed the bill mandating all school children and their teachers carry a firearm, performing mass shootings had become increasingly difficult. This known solution, the ubiquity of firearms, plagued the twenty-five-year-old Roger Walker.
He sat in his jeep outside the Milton Karen Academy, which was a prestigious blue-ribbon school for grades kindergarten through high school. Roger held the cold, metallic semi-automatic that rested on his lap. Just last month, before the mandate, when he canvassed the school, it looked peaceful and easy. Now, it gave off the feeling of breaching a military base. He knew he had to stay clear of the gymnasium since it was turned into a shooting range when gym class was replaced with shooting class. …
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Abiquiu, New Mexico
I return to Leopoldo Garcia’s home gallery
where, this damp morning-glory morning,
he wears overalls and one tennis shoe.
Yesterday his litany of augurs, acrylic and clay
flowed like red nectar. Hummingbird
in his studio, I bring a gift of poems.
Leopoldo paints with a hole in his heart
pierced by a priest darker than a cassock.
He grieves for the children gone forever,
mica tears grafted on flat masks, tiny
eyes, round mouths. Nearby his studio
a weathered red and white figure…
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I see him during the day. His back to the street, on the edge of the curb, he’s positioned as far from the building as he can be while still under the scaffolding. On sunny days the wooden planks shield him from the heat. When it rains he moves inward, far enough to protect himself from getting drenched, but not so far as to disturb passersby. There are two battered shopping carts beside him, each filled to the brim with obscure items wrapped in plastic bags. He’s dressed in black, layered according to the dictates of weather. Often I see him comfortably seated in a chair. Sometimes he’s reading a book. At mealtimes, he unfolds a small table, places plates and utensils, and eats. He doesn’t look at me when I walk by, doesn’t solicit, doesn’t confront.…
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