Midday. The family sits behind Emmanuel’s corpse. His adolescent granddaughters, self-conscious, their bursting nipples squeezed in white Sunday dresses: three child brides for their grandfather’s funeral. Sweat gathers and tickles in the crease behind their knees. A veil of mosquito netting is spread over the body in the open casket. On the wall above the…
Do I begin at the here and now, or does the story start with the first time my mother took the wheel— the first woman to drive in a country where men are afraid to walk? My mother’s story begins when the steam rises. It ends when it’s ready. Taste it. Does it need more…
Half-awake she hears hooves at the door— a stallion enters her Chamber of Longing. When the door thunders shut she recalls the fury of her childhood; Mother’s venomous beauty, Father, adept at lighting amber in the eye of the sexual god. The listless husband picked out for her has left her without heirs. Beyond that…
Returning home to grade five now to Mister Blackwood’s jockey pointer and Mistress Sommerville’s short fingers— their long lessons beneath that mammoth guango tree; to hoppers popping and squirting from grass—our own green- and-brown bubbly; and the dominick fowls coupling nearby. I return now to our cricket pitch, fresh-pressed like cloth, and creased with chalk;…
Ain’t no way this river or any other is wide enough to slow us down, no bust-gut half-ass ocean got the means nor the notion to make this anything but fine— why bother to slip on or out of that little bit of nevermind tonight cause it don’t matter none to rhythm and blues…
translated by Khaled Mattawa I knelt to tie my shoes in the frost and heard the rattle of an Indian’s throat or maybe the groan of an animal led to slaughter I imagined men bearing their weapons extinct since The Fifth Article of the Bill of Rights was recited since all applauded it and…
It flew in through the kitchen window that summer a few years after the war, the year I turned four or five, that fragile yellow bird Made In Japan whose insides had been sucked out when the bomb fell on Hiroshima. All it required for nourishment was the sweet, cold water I poured into the…
In the photograph of Billie Holiday taken by Mickey Pallas at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, she wears a low-cut evening gown & a fawn-colored stole. Her rhinestone earrings are shoulder-dusters, & her necklace falls almost to her cleavage in heavy leaves of glass stones, or maybe they are real (though paste gems on Billie…
The front door’s latch slides into its brass socket, the kind of sound that pushes you off, like a flip turn at the pool, your thighs recoil and you’re out past the flags, well on your way . . . only I’m talking about the last lap, when there’s no next turn, the future is…
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