My life changed with a boring car ride. “Dad, the film isn’t ready,” I said from the backseat. “Want me to put it together?”
Three more hours of driving separated us and Springfield, Missouri, and I wanted to watch film of the other teams in the Midwest Showcase tournament at Hammons Field, not YouTube videos of big leaguers breaking down swings and pitching mechanics. Been there, done that.
“Nah,” my dad, and coach, replied. “No need for you to spend your time on that, I’ll do it when we get to the hotel. You could watch some pitching mechanics videos.”
I frowned at the back of his shaved head and looked out the window. Dad had uploaded video clips to the Dreamz Teamz app, and technically, me and my teammates could watch them.…
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G. R. was dreaming if you could call it that. It was more of a nightmare. He knew he was a caterpillar. He could get around, but the immediate stages before left a lot to be desired. In his dream he was tied up by some bratty kid in a weird contraption slowly turning over and over: one side he’s up: a tiny egg stuck on some shitty leaf and then it flipped and he’s a pupa stuck inside his own shell. Talk about the mother of nightmares. And he’s a little runt to top it off. Oh, I’ll get even. Just wait until I wake up and come out of my cocoon. Tsetse flies will be considered chump change.
He heard it again and again.…
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I walk past the same corner each day
where I would sit between classes
and talk to you, where the skateboarder
nearly collided
into me
as you spoke of your old friend
who was dying of cancer
but wouldn’t stop smoking
and I complained of my anemia
how I barely had the energy
to stand in front of a class
for thirty minutes
And all the time I was wondering
how much longer
we could keep it going
because this was a thing
we had been doing for twenty years
without ever agreeing to
or addressing it because
that might entail giving it up…
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The title 1000 Pieces of Time provides insight into the author’s concerns: time, mortality, and imagination.
Clock time goes forward. A person is born and dies in clock time. What to do faced with the inevitable? The poet confronts mortality with imagination. His speaker finds beauty, Botticelli’s Venus, on a travel poster in a window on a block of boarded up stores. Venus looks downcast, “as if she knew / how beauty could be stolen / how winter always crushes spring.” With imagination a child, Mary, teaches a rooster to walk backwards in “Walking Backwards.” Today she is immortalized in her stories, in a book titled The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Conner. “The Sweater,” is set in the present. The detail of “a thread unraveling / on the sleeve of a shirt” evokes a poignant memory of the poet’s grandmother’s life.…
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As she sat
bent over,
in the least-smudged chair of my garden set,
my sister told of
a neighbour who styled his garden
—its stubborn hedges and out-of-average-reach trees—
with hair tweezers and nail clippers (for feet).
As she drank
her coffee,
cross clover continued to unroot the grass,
and drunk wasps circled ground-struck apricots,
while unimpeachable ivy
succeeded in suffocating the “permanent” plants
in the borders—green nooses left unseen.
As my eyes
grazed over
the playfully growing decay, I knew
she wasn’t talking about my nature
and though I already had my answer, I still asked
my sister—
‘You think the garden has something to say[?]’
– Josje Weusten…
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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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