I was walking north on Columbus Avenue looking at a woman walking south whose face struck me as somewhat peculiar—wild hair, platinum dye, stern joyless expression—and registering that the peculiar face was itself regarding my own with the same measure of scrutiny if not befuddlement. One encounters this kind of situation in New York City with sufficient regularity to ignore its over-or-under-tones and continue walking on without seeking clarification, which is exactly what I did. About three steps past the woman I heard, “Hey!” which stimulated my ignore button further. Then “Hey!” again, this time more insistently and followed by my name.
Reluctantly I turned, and as I’d feared, it was the peculiar-looking woman.
She said, “You just walk right past like you don’t even know me?”…
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It all began with little whispers, like the chirps of crickets in a wooden rickety garage. My father had ordered everyone in the house to remain calm, and if one must talk, it mustn’t be anything more than a little whisper or a movement of hands. The subsequent gunshots were strong enough to force all households, including the lazy ones to press locks by their doors. My father stood in the concrete open-chalet built in the middle of our compound. An average height building; long enough to allow him to examine the footsteps on his wall, and short enough to prevent seeing the inside from the outside.
It was 23rd July, 2009, the young morning was already ripe to allow the Sunday sunshine envelop its body.…
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after Anita Beth McDaniel Swaim
1.
In a familiar wave, you set
your wires down for an edge,
are told you have taken on excess,
so you receive a cut
and feel the land fall away to the west.
You see how foreign dust
developed at a border.
You will never grow any larger.
2.
Musically, you are a rattle
breaking through tall grass,
a weighted drum of plow
felt in wooden yoke.
Even the reluctance of rain
hangs on a beat, drifting, and
again into a steep rush
sung into wide-valleyed theater.
You know to blow hard-lunged
with no warning
that spring of whirring strands unraveling
with train sounds hurled howling
in unrelenting night.
So few applaud come morning,
so few to applaud.…
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I see an oddly maligned portrait, out there beyond the field, where the trees curl up the sides of the nubby landscape, where intentions are laid bare in the shade of their leaves, drooping, thick and unctuous in the summer air. Is the way he moved his arm, motioning toward nothing in particular, an indication?
Heavy wasps float through the haze on sagging wings. Hot breath is drenched on us, despair comes and goes, all the colors from before are different now, so that it becomes harder to remember that I am me.
I float, with the leaves, the leaves and me, we float downstream in the sluggish current of the brown creek. Being younger now, I have a sense that it doesn’t end, but in a flash the tributary joins the river and loses its brief individuality.…
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Set the scene: this is day two of a four-month study abroad experience in Buenos Aires. It is a hot Argentine summer, which is to say, the temperature is in the mid-nineties on the first day of March. All of you have been here for roughly twenty-four hours, and none of you feel fully adjusted to the sudden heat after below-freezing temperatures.
You go to a big university back home. Big enough that, despite the fact that half the people in this program are from your school, you know not a single face. You are playing name games in your head, matching faces with stories you hear out loud, with pictures next to names in group chats. The room is filled with five long tables, and as you are seated second-closest to the front, you see in front of you a set of quintuplets.…
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Rebecca stood under the plum tree. She reached her tiny fingers up, picking one off the lowest branch. It barely fit in the palm of her hands. Rebecca ran through the yard toward the porch, careful to not trip. Her mother, May, sat stitching a blue dress with yellow patches. May watched her daughter run up with a plum in her hands.
Lord, she prayed, give me patience.
“Momma,” Rebecca said, “you fixing my dress for church?”
“Baby, no. We ain’t going today. And, I told you to leave that tree alone,” May said, eyes never leaving her stitching. “Go put that plum back where you found it. Give the deer something to eat.”
“Momma,” Rebecca said, rolling her eyes. “I picked it off the tree.”…
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this man
who surfaces
at rush hour
to homeward
bound cars
tucked in a
once-tan jacket
grey beard
(the kind Caribbean
economists wear)
walking in a side waddle
bad feet, wrong shoes
propelling into the street
when lights change
to stop cars
knock on windows…
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