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.…
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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.…
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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.…
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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. …
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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.…
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The bright moonlight illuminated Old Roy’s body as it lay splattered across the two-lane country highway. The car had not even slowed. It struck him without consequence and left him lying on the pavement. A pickup truck, following closely, hit him again—skin, bone, and hair pasted to the road. Only his scaly tail remained recognizable. Neither vehicle took notice of the prominent, unambiguous signpost: “Opossum Crossing.”
I slipped under the barbed wire fence, waddled across the field, and into the wood with a heavy heart, dreading the prospect of breaking the news to Henrietta and her joeys. Not a week went by without the community being hard hit by a fatality or two. Mostly, the very young or very old fell victim to the speeding machines, their blinding headlights making escape nearly impossible.…
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All day long my phone has been ringing.
Like an insect rubbing its legs together
to sing. Calls coming in from area codes
I don’t recognize. No one there when I answer.
All day long it has been ringing.
Like a bird who only remembers one song.
I miss the days when it could be quieted
by gently placing it back in its cradle
instead of having to stab at it with my finger
over and over again. No one there when I answer.
It didn’t used to be like this. I used to sleep
through the night. Not now. Now I wake up
every two hours thinking I hear my mother
thumping her cane on the floor after a fall,
and when I open my eyes I never recognize
the room I’m in.…
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