Jui’s paternal aunt, Bomma, had been a hoarder for as long as Jui could remember. The dull maroon single-door LG refrigerator would sag and droop under the weight of expired ketchup bottles, moldy slices of Amul cheese and steel tiffin boxes filled with the month’s leftovers. Bomma was not someone who threw or gave away anything. Boxes of sweets offered for Ma Kali’s puja would be relegated to the bottom shelf and swiftly forgotten as she was insanely diabetic. Their housemaid Asma’s special mutton biriyani would ferment for days on end after she had had one bite and found the meat too hard to chew. Stray mayonnaise and chilli sauce sachets would accumulate by the dozen on the rickety brackets of the fridge door. Every once in a while Asma would attempt to perform a cursory clean-up and be rewarded with choice words for her trouble.…
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One Sunday morning in May, my mother telephoned and asked me to attend Mass with her. I was busy packing my books and deciding which ones to leave for my nephew Sam and his sisters, and I had fourteen papers on Theme in The Great Gatsby to read and mark by the end of the day. I didn’t want to go to church. But the Mass was being said in memory of Papa Vincent, my grandfather, dead these twenty years, and members of his family would be expected to bear the gifts—the little carafes of water and wine and the loot from the collections—to the altar during the Offertory Procession. My father, the sweetest soul I knew, was feeling under the weather, and my brother, a believer, was out of town.…
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The sun shines hard on the thick blades of crabgrass whose roots carve deep into the hard dog-pissed soil while the seven year cicadas play high, heavenly strings in search of a dying mate. In the speckled shade of a young cedar elm a small day old bird has fallen from its nest and is crying. The freshly mowed grass is crying too; one million blades cropped to the shoulder on one fifth of an acre and then a brown stained fence between another stiff fifth and they are all drowned out easily by the low fierce whir of dark green ac units cooling homes spaced as evenly apart. Every home with the same brown fence, every home with the same grey driveway, every home with the same blue sky, every home with the same small elm planted, and it will be twenty-five years and three new owners before children swing from the branches.…
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Outside the wide front windows, rain is washing
the field of concrete with sheets of
water, the cars sitting like obedient puppies
as grime falls away from their coats
Outside the windows, laughing people scurry
under any overhang to keep dry and
pull back their children who strain to slap the soles
of their feet -and the soul of
their hearts- against the shining surface of
gathering puddles
Outside the windows, two men sit where they
found refuge for smokers under the
window overhang, a tin can as ashtray balanced
on the bench between them,
the profile of the elder showing him speak as
the younger reaches a hand to touch
the frail man’s shoulder.
Inside the windows, the air has turned the shade
found at the mouth of a cave, shadows
in far corners, growing darker deeper inside the
usually bright bar.…
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I only found out on my tenth birthday that I had to wait three more years to be a teenager. Up to the age of nine years, 365 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds (it was a leap year the year I turned ten) I thought teen just meant double digits. But apparently they set up a system where some of the double digit numbers had the suffix -teen in their names, and ten, eleven, and twelve were not them, and you had to have the suffix –teen in your age to be an actual teenager.
I can still hear my infuriating older brother George informing me of this at 12:01 a.m. on the very morning I turned ten. Maybe 12:05.…
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the streets are slick with Fidel Castro’s ambition. Tears and blood flow through the pipes underneath and remain collected in the large clay jars planted in front of my family’s former homes. Red, white, and blue patriotism may be a reason for execution if arranged improperly on the flag. America still restricts travel to the island, where my father is unrecognizable as a citizen of the United States. The streetlights cease even to flicker above crumbling roads that were once a path through the Pearl of the Antilles. Graying yellow and teal buildings surrender themselves to relentless winds that whip up from the sugarcane fields to reveal only an overpowering flavor of salt instead. The city brings memories too painful to explore into the hearts of my abuelos; it is a reminder that the grass was greener and the ocean more inviting.…
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We do our best to escape
the shadow of the wreath.
Nothin’ but a losin’ battle.
Our hearts we dye in grey,
with fate we stain and streak.
Colors of imbalance.
Death is a lengthy day
that all will fully know.
The end will come before
or after
in the moon or through the sea.
We do our best to escape
the shadow of the wreath.
– Lance Mazmanian
Author’s Note: This poem was written with a nod toward the October 1987 song “History Will Teach Us Nothing” by Sting (aka Gordon Sumner). No real relation apart from rhythm.…
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