We drove past abandoned homes and trailers that collectively
left the impression of a salvage yard
*
We stopped and parked in an empty lot near the house
with an old hearse (slowly dressing in a desert
patina) and a giant clam
*
At that point we followed the disjointed string
of “everyone else”
*
Over the dike and down to the beach
*
I took pics. I got the bones of a ship. I got a homeless mailbox.
I skipped the Lisa del Giocondo porch (face without a body,
face without a face) because my Mona Lisa refused to pose.
I zoomed in on the large swing in the water
and the misty mountains
*
When I got closer to the water I continued with my wading beauty:
swing & mountains, swing & shoreline, swing & black-necked
stilt, swing-seat & pendant fish
*
I took a break from the swing.…
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I was the one who fished Izabella out of the sea.
It was just like her to do something like that, convince me to help her row out for an adventure, then dive too deep and come up too fast. “Beware the Bends,” everyone warned when we registered for diving lessons, but Izabella never listened. She lept before I could act and swam deeper than I could see. Minutes later, her hands splashed atop the water, but her legs hung immobile.
I knew what happened, even before ambulance lights danced across the sand and the official doctor’s verdict. A bubble of air in her spinal cord exploded during her rapid ascent—the Bends.
She couldn’t even think about her paralysis, only the dragon skeleton, the answer to her riddle.…
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“One day that building will collapse,” Harry told me as we stood in front of the condominium on 79th Street and Columbus Avenue. It had been just completed that autumn of 1982. “Carbuncle Construction,” Harry called it. He was right. The condo with its shiny glass was a true eyesore nestled next to a row of brownstones. Across the street, The American Museum of Natural History seemed to sneer at the new intruder with burnished windows that glowed with gold antique hues.
“How are you so sure?” I asked Harry that day, who had a sly smile as if he looked forward to the destruction.
“My roommate is sleeping with the architect, who told him they miscalculated all the engineering designs.”
This was supposed to shock me.…
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Mary opens the maintenance garage at the golf course before sunrise. A bird is waiting inside to greet her. A belted kingfisher, rare for Missouri in late December. In a flash of slate blue, the bird soars out through the garage opening. Three hours of tree trimming later, she sees the bird again––for two seconds, maybe three––near the sixteenth hole, under the bare oak behind the green. She cuts back limbs on trees that surround the putting surface, then works through the seventeenth hole, the eighteenth. She returns to the garage. In the break room, she heats up what’s left of the coffee she brewed for herself hours earlier—this time of year, she’s the only person on the course. As the club owner, she gives her staff two weeks off for the holidays.…
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Hot enough for even crows to go missing.
………..I’ve been digging in shadeless afternoons,
………..giving him odds and ends. The wasp in a fig.
Mollusks in shells. Lightbulb filament.
He gathers interiors and finds use but
………..does not sweat and say we can fix this.
………..The kiss at day’s end is a way
to place heirlooms on a high shelf while
ants trickle into midnight dens, envious parade
………..of scent and function and I believe
………..in them at least, electromagnetic love and order
running an empire beneath toes burnt by patio. Again
and again, open windows refuse to cool even in
………..dark hours. No one remembers where the moon
………..hides all day or for how many months
a half-eaten cake in the freezer keeps. …
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Father Pepe swept the volcanic ash off the sidewalk leading to his church. The narrow shoulders on his slight frame moved back and forth in rhythm as he worked his way down the walkway. A young man approaching middle age, Father Pepe appeared delicate but wiry.
The volcano had never erupted in an explosion of lava. Instead, it constantly belched out the ash that covered the town of Santa Clara and the fields of coffee plants nearby, like God emptied his ashtray over the land. Everyone in the village cleaned away volcanic ash from windowsills, cars, and walkways daily.
The coffee fields were the lynchpins of Santa Clara’s economy, and despite efforts to prevent it, the ash choked the plants. If the volcano did not cease its grey discharge soon, the coffee shrubs would all be dead, and so would Santa Clara.…
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I hold my hands up to the sky & wait for lightning to strike me, after all I have been lying
awake at night, stitched into the side of your name like another bruise left on this body that cannot hold itself up any longer
than the night’s coldness in summer which is when I’m writing this as a way to escape the nightmares of you marrying him
in sacrilegious revenge to God’s humor which is to say my arrogance has left me faithless
in the process of healing
//
I looked to the world running wherever the wind would blow me, crashing down in a thunderclap leaving hollowed memories, ghosts I gave names to, associating them with scars I connect together like a map detailing where I’ve been — constellations to guide me towards the shore & out of the sea’s vast loneliness.…
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