I was looking at my father’s bookshelves when I noticed things other than books. My father had put ceramics in the empty spaces. There were some vases and bowls, but among the ordinary objects were two figures. They were made from red clay, maybe terra-cotta, and their surfaces were rough—each stood about a foot-and-a-half tall. They were wearing robes, so their arms and legs were hidden by folds of “cloth.” Their faces were simplified, yet suggested nobility. Each was wearing a crown: They were a king and queen.
It wasn’t clear if they were a specific king and queen, or whether they were generic. But I soon realized they were chess pieces. I didn’t see a giant chessboard or any other oversized pieces to match. Maybe my father hadn’t planned for these objects to be used in an actual game of chess.…
My reticent leanings began at a young age. I was about eight years old when my younger sister died from leukemia. Life for us before that was idyllic. Our father worked for a multinational oil company and we’d lived abroad starting soon after I was born, with all the benefits bestowed upon expatriates. My sister, Gail, was born in Jamacia, which for us in the 1950s was a paradise, very safe and very British. Gail’s cancer put an end to all of that. We returned to the United States.
Gail’s death was my fault, as far as I knew. I’d failed to do what a big brother was supposed to do: keep her safe. Sixty years later, I’ve not convinced myself that isn’t true. And I don’t expect I ever will.…
The moving truck is angled backwards in the driveway, and the “For Sale” sign sways a few feet from the blood red X someone spray-painted in our yard. Our house is hollowed out, its insides packed thick and sloppy in the truck. The love seat is inverted on the sofa, and the kitchen table stands flush against the side. Bags of clothes, lampshades, and boxes of toys are seated in stacked chairs. There’s bed mattresses and chipped picture frames. Old books and older bookshelves. Porcelain whatnots wrapped in a month’s worth of sports section.
The wind blows the sign over and I set it back up. Drive it six inches in the ground and look at the large X.
I step inside. What’s left of the boxes, mostly dishes and photo albums, are scattered around the living room floor. …
You disappeared quicker than I could watch. Who would have thought gravity faster than light, fire from the stars we know already two hundred and fifty years behind, not able to compete with the satellites passing above the place where we lay on the equatorial line, staring at the heavens. All through the night they traced our sleeping as if following a magnet, orbits slowly degrading, a limited number of concentric circles, while they signaled, mapped, tracked, escaping atmosphere to briefly return, disintegrating.
Author’s Note: This poem is about a disintegrating romantic relationship. We went to Chang Mai in 1990 and trekked up near the Burmese border to a village where were to get on a bamboo raft and paddle back towards Chang Mai. …
A memory of my father: we are on the train together—the subway that goes above ground, the subway that goes below ground, and we are on our way. On our way to so many places.
A memory of my father: the train stops at a station and my father stands up. I stand up with him, but he tells me to sit down. “Don’t get up,” he says. “I’m just going to check the map.” He holds onto the doorway and lurches outside; his body is out of the train car, getting as close to the map on the platform as possible. It looks like he is about to let go and jump out onto the platform, and I imagine the train doors closing with me in it and him outside of it, and I become afraid and rush to his side.…
Sam Carranza wasn’t at the San Bernard library to escape the heat or read the papers. He was looking for a man. Sam had a picture, taken years earlier. It showed a spry sixty-something with a mop of white hair and clear blue eyes. Thadée Molyneux would have been a good fit for the elderly set that perused publications in the library lounge, but he wasn’t among them.
Molyneux had dementia. He absconded from the retirement home where Bella, his daughter, had put him. Bella, teary-eyed, told Sam the police had called it quits. It was end July in heat-hammered West Texas. Molyneux might have fallen in a ditch, encountered a rattler, or a two-legged predator. The cops gave Bella Sam’s number. Maybe he could help, and his fee was reasonable.…
He makes love to her wondering if it will be the last time. He walks out afterward, but not in a cruel way. He’d held her, run his fingers through her dark hair, massaged her scalp with his fingertips, looked into her brown eyes and told her he loved her. He leaves knowing he had told her the truth.
He drives away trying not to think about her tears or her confusion as to why. He was terrible at trying to explain why; to her, to his parents. All he knows for sure is that something inside—his heart, or conscience, or spirit, or whatever the fuck, is pulling him away from everything familiar. He has to leave. No forwarding address, no plan, no idea where he’s going.…
