1 Tell me how the prison broke you. The first night, they played with a man in the next cell. Nine rollers scrunched in the tiny stall, hardly room to swing a fist—sometimes one elbowed another and apologized— the inmate wailed absentmindedly, just a voice, and I listened. I thought: I’d see you again. I’d…
All summer Papá holds a cigarette out the window of his laser-green Buick, points his lips left to blow the smoke into the mirage of exhaust between rush-hour cars. All summer he listens to La Cubanisima on AM radio exploding with accounts of how Castro took everything we had, how we’d get it back someday….
It was Wednesday, I remember. Maybe it was Thursday. I had arrived early, early enough to drink some good wine alone with a man I thought we all should fear and for a second forgot. Then they arrived. Nothing in me had changed, even after the wine, even after I saw a goat and corpse…
And then, one day, though my mother had sent me upstairs to prepare, my thumbs were no longer opposable, they would not hook into the waistband, they swung, limp—under my underpants was the Y of elastic, its metal teeth gripping the pad, I couldn’t be punished unless I was bare, but I couldn’t be bare…
Look: paper screen blank; the color white, a zero, hollow light bulb, the O not yet typed. This means no imagination without its imagery. Letters can appear as bones (Do not forget the image) if you write with calcium. Because a subject…
Like someone trying to nap in a room with a glaring terrarium God rolls over but before resuming his dream where He’s a lover decked out in a sunbeam, He glances at the blue planet he made, at continents crashing and mountains popping up, at sheets of dirt settling in streams and streams settling in…
The sail had been drawn into an albino python hung vertically for the town to witness. The sea too shallow to dock. The boat its chipped purple belly remained somewhat distant solitary with only its static reflection. The fishermen swam to shore. Dark-brown sand their patterned trails to the plaza for rest. One wore a…
June. A white heat. Two schoolgirls with crisp collars tread home on a red road. Two young boys with crew cuts yawn in the third tank, blink from five hours sleep. Blue dragonflies, girlsweat, orange dust on Adidases… Green interior. Boysweat. A twist of knobs and dials. Down the…
Well we did our best in deracinated weather. Daughters were wedding daughters, suddenly. They’d registered at Bed Bath & Beyond. Rain-hurled catalpa flowers bruised the yard. The dual-mothered bride procured a dress, to her surprise. Pert cannabis jungled up. One wandered under oaks, umbrella’d to the hilt, like some female in a lyric or a…
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