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Seed

1. He looked at the seed for a long time. His mind did not comprehend. It did not flower anymore. The seed was just a seed.                                            She had said it was begonia. He tried to imagine what begonias looked like. Purple blossoms, rich yellow, supple orange, blue petals? The mind that made the seed…

True Prophets

Their speech doesn’t sound prophetic: “Wish the damn heat would let up.” “Do you carry three-inch finishing nails?” Too late their wisdom becomes clear. True prophets, though, care nothing for prophecy. It just sweats out of them like garlic from the pores of one who eats Korean food. Prophets adore food which is thoughtfully prepared….

Believe This

There was a time I wanted nothing so much as home. In the rain I loved you, in the hot days; The corn ripened; I was a child of storms And of seasons. I ventured and was lost, But, oh, those salty songs of the damned! Death has a green foot, And we dance like…

Surrounded

There are no albums of family photographs in our house. Before he left last Sunday night, Gort must have carried them all out the front door and piled them at the curb for the garbage men. The black marbled copybooks full of nature notes must have gone the same way; when I broke into the…

Black: Her Story

The Mexican Mother Meets the Oldest Living Virgin of Manila Q ueridisimo Doctorcito: Thank you for the foetus you sent me. The baby boy. Would you say I was a jazz poem, spit from the mouth of a saxophone? Or would you send me straight to hell? Pensamiento, pentimento, pimiento . . . Can you…

Flight

John-John had been saving dollar bills toward a dream and when he had a shoebox full of bills he sat down to count out his future. “One, two, three,” he counted, all the way up to ten to make a neat stack on the floor and soon, he had two hundred neat stacks in exact…

La Source

to Grandmother, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, August 1991 I bear down on the leaf that carries me to home and ground, peer through a corner, see the gaze that slipped in and out of walls at home, bared, looking at the valley, a brown wind that uncords knots, binds storms to dust, lifts stars, skies, the abscess…