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.… ...continue reading
Paul can hear the sound of the fairground rides a little way away. There’s shouting from the pikeys trying to get the dodgems working so they can spin the pretty girls around. Closer, there’s his mates kicking the ball about, the girls lathering themselves up with oil hoping to get brown. He’s aware that there’s chatter but Paul can’t hear what they’re saying. He could if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to right now. He likes the sound of the waves gushing in and out, the seagulls cawing obnoxiously. It’s nice here. He feels safe.
Paul’s mouth is dry and his throat is tight as though he’s been smoking cigarettes, except he hasn’t and he doesn’t understand why this always happens to him. He’s hungover.… ...continue reading
A sunset is not supposed to be sinister. But as we sat on a blanket on the beach in Dennis Port looking up at a giant orange quivering on the horizon, I didn’t experience awe or wonder or transcendence. Only alarm. The waning sun reinforced in my drained soul what the heavens already knew: Humans were just another species. If Jo destroyed me, the cosmos would not know or care.
Jo was not alarmed, however, having forgotten, as he tended to do, the most recent expression of his detestation for me. No, instead, he sat transfixed, no doubt bursting with spiritual stirrings inside.
There was any number of friends I could have taken on my few days at the beach, none of whom would have put me through the dicer this holiday had been.… ...continue reading
I didn’t know who he was when we went to his museum. My family told me his name, but I didn’t understand the meaning behind it. I just remember finding his name really funny. I rolled the r dramatically and shimmied my shoulders whenever I repeated it back to them. My family found it funny too, because I was around five years old, and this guy was way, way before my time. But we made the trip to that museum anyways. My family figured they should teach me about him. He was a great performer after all.
The first building had all of his cars lined up. They were beautiful ones too. I wish I could tell you all the details, but I can’t remember much.… ...continue reading
……………………..The garden abandoned, soil hardened
…………..to brick, the seasons of my mother’s hearted cabbage
blown by full and quick as a song.
……………………..Once she fed me, and once I was young
…………..enough to be fed. My bowl now waits
blank as a page, porcelain made of bone ash
……………………..and brittle teeth. Here memory I pull along,
…………..red slatted wagon I can’t cut loose.
But where else is there to look? Bodies gone
……………………..cold, my hands even colder, the cursive
…………..of her hair on the pillow a fortune
I can’t decipher. Some people glide toward their fates
……………………..like a bride through a bloomed trellis.
I press my lips to their trains.
– Sandra Yee… ...continue reading
The sun through the door threw a hard rectangle of light across the red dust of the hut’s wooden floor. Hoa squatted in the shadows, watching a black beetle scaling the woven-reed screen over the window nearby. With an empty face, she dwelt on the decision handed down by her parents. She could not leave her village to study at the school in Dien Bien Phu. Her hands and body would be needed in the rice terraces and mango groves in the year ahead, though this was no consolation to her disappointment.
Truong Pho Thong Vung Cao was a boarding academy for children from the neighboring hill-tribes in Dien Bien Province and had, more than a year before, notified Hoa’s family that she was a candidate for the school.… ...continue reading
Florida isn’t really that crazy. Sure, on any given day one might see a shrunken old man in a giant caddie driving on the line like it’s there to guide him from Publix to the retirement village he came from, but most of the time it’s just warm. Well, hot. But even hurricanes aren’t that crazy. Because right in the middle of one everything comes to a halt; the wind, the rain stops, and the world is silent for once because everyone is inside. Quiet until the eye passes over and the winds tear right through the palms again. But then the palms are replanted, the floodwater goes somewhere, and life is good.
So, when I say I never meant to get on the wrong side of the law I really meant it.… ...continue reading