I thank God for el Mercado, in Santurce, where we filled our bags. I thank God for the chopped translucence of onions above which we poured oregano & salt. & I thank God for yellow oil in the pot, the buckle & hiss of heat under a pan. I am thankful for the kitchen table:…
circa 1946 Just after his release Mas took a psychological test. Three questions he never forgot: Do you think people are out to get you? Do you feel you are being followed? When you see a crowd of strangers walking toward you, do you try to avoid them? To all three he answered yes. And…
When my brother tells me he’s been seeing a psychiatrist, I say, "That’s great, Jack." He says, "Why—you think I’m fucked up?" I say, "How’d you find him?" He says, "What makes you think my psychiatrist is a man?" Her name is Mary Pat Delmar, and Jack tells me she is brilliant. He says, "She…
Avila, 1982 When the civil guards approached me and asked me for my papers, I recalled the face of a sunny saint being disemboweled on the rack. Widows in perennial black, addicts of prayer, find comfort here the way monks in hair shirts must take to penance, or me, addled in my blissed-out days in…
A cop car rounds a corner, headlights throw a man’s silhouette large against an apartment building. A window opens from his rib. A woman steps through and pushes off the ledge. She floats four stories. Doesn’t flail. Doesn’t scream or scratch at passing bricks. She is sure as gravity, her fall as inevitable. She floats….
"On any given day, Mother could have her pick of maids. The women, usually Hmong, would line the open markets and scurry after her, offering to carry her bags. Mother decided that she was going to plan a special meal. Father was coming home from the military soon. They would celebrate. The end of his…
It was not as hard to steal the collie pup as he thought it would be. From early morning when the woman set up and wiped her table with a cloth until the time the silver container of coffee was emptied by those coming to look at the dogs, there had been somebody around…
I didn’t know then how couples flow into the space around each other— how Max’s sweet exuberance was only made possible by Rose’s bitter chill. Who knew what that whole generation of refugees had gone through? I knew nothing about them— only that Max had been to Alaska, had prospected for gold. Said words like…
The hotter the sun the whiter the bloom, my grandmother used to say of the dogwoods, Christ’s trees, still bearing his blood, and our hearts, of course, in need of redemption. On her cue, I’d wield a bowl of potato peels out past the barn to the hog pen where…
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