He’ll be back soon; he never takes long.
I sit on the rough wooden floor, dirt and pine needles sticking to my yellow smock as the firelight dwindles. I’m supposed to be adding wood, feeding it like Mr. John does, but the ache in my body stalls my progress. The single-room cabin is cluttered with cans, rusty animal traps and furs. Centering the room is a small wooden table that is heaped with dirty tin plates and Mr. John’s carving projects.
My rear is sticky and wet; I should clean up the blood. I should wash the dishes. Mr. John would tell me there’s no use sitting around, there’s work to be done and I’ve been abed too long. I have been watching the crack of light beneath the door – the only window to the outside we have.…
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Earlier
Monday is fine to get a new job. To start over. Each day he filled applications. Life could be worse. He had somewhere to stay, it had a big view. Twenty-third floor, sweet view of the city. The business zones and tourist gyps, pocket-sized.
Warm for September, strength in the hazy sun. Crafting statements of suitability and refreshing his resume, he gazed between multiplied windows, across rail yards of long, grey wagons, to where the city burst like an emergency through the flat land. On the twenty-third floor, among gliding gulls.
Between the towers and the city, a fortified, rectangular block intrigued him. Too squat and fierce for apartments, a slab of layered windows and fussy turrets. A prison, floating alone on bare real estate.…
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Magic shoved his back-pack and carry-on onto the back seat of my idling Corolla, slammed the door shut, and jumped in beside me in the front—one fell swoop.
“Good to see you,” I said, and turned to face the stream of traffic passing on my side of the car. I’d stole only a quick look at Magic when he hopped in next to me. Jet-lagged face. No smile. A bit dejected maybe after having left his ancestorial homeland. But clean shaven now, and without the long hair and samurai-bun that he had when I dropped him at the airport ten days before. I was focused on the traffic out, watching to my left for an opportunity to slip into the steady parade of cars on the roadway leaving the airport terminal.…
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—november
a year ago this morning
as orange oak leaves drifted
from branch to ground
i was making love
not knowing
a year ago midday
i showered and went
to work, warmed against
crackling frost palming
the window glass
not knowing
a year ago 12:34 p.m.
i missed the call
a year ago 12:37 p.m.
inoperable brain bleed—
i barely heard through
the barking of six dogs.
dad held the phone to your mouth.
your last garbled words—
go inventory your dogs
a year ago 1:21 p.m.
i hurled my duffel into
the car i’d put 15,000
miles on that year
crying at least 8,000
drove past november
trees, lawn stippled red,
brown, fragrant black
knowing
it was the last time i
would see home this way
that when i returned
rainbow leaves would
be rotting muck
winter hanging heavy
on the garden fence
cemetery ground too frozen
to bury anything
as alive as
sorrow
– Megan Peralta…
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Memory foam never forgets. Sheets get washed, then wicked smooth by billowing backyard winds. But the indentations, the curves of a known, supine body, they never quite fade. Cleaning out Gran’s house, I was struck by the remnants of her shape in her newly vacated bed. Here she had lain for so many years, unable to make it down the stairs more than once a day, never venturing outside save for the occasional doctor’s appointment. While I was in college, she had called me once a week like clockwork, asking about grades and professors and what books I was being made to read. “Once a teacher, always a teacher,” she would echo into the phone with a throaty chuckle that still sounded like smoke despite several decades of tobacco sobriety.…
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She swims in Winnipesaukee to capture loons
on film. Their oily feathers are black and white.
A squall disrupts the summer afternoon.
When heavy rain clouds burst like water balloons,
New Hampshire’s favorite fowl disperse in flight.
Why visit Winnipesaukee? To capture loons
on film requires a telescopic lens.
Lightning and thunder explode like dynamite
when squalls disrupt the summer afternoons.
Her hopes for perfect pictures lie in ruins.
She works so hard to photograph the sight
of Winnipesaukee’s elusive flocks of loons.
Their call resembles the sound of contrabassoons
tuning for a symphony at night.
Summer squalls disrupt the afternoons
when eager scouts arrive at camp in June.
Buying postcards is for hypocrites!
She drinks to Winnipesaukee to toast the loons,
but squanders her dreams in cheap saloons.…
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We live out our lives here in Bogota, as people elsewhere. In the mornings when we wake, we look out at the weather; and we go to our offices and our shops and factories; we go to the cinema and we gossip with and about our friends, we have our lunch-breaks, and in the evenings we come home to our families, those of us who have families. On Sundays we watch soccer and swim in the ponds, we go to Mass and we eat in our favourite restaurants. We have our regrets and pleasures and we fill the city cemeteries.
We know about the stuff that the rest of the world knows about, the stuff about Bogota: the drugs and the gangs, the killings. We know about them, but they happen in the south of the city, in the poor areas, and most of us don’t live there.…
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