The Streets Are Flowing Rivers The blacks on McCullough Street, Druid Hill Avenue and Linden Avenue were people of the Depression in Prohibition neighborhoods that Jean Toomer called "the Preacher-Driven Race"-faces that have all faded, all gone now with a quiet dignity, who on many a Sunday morning sang "My Lord What a Morning" and…
for Camilo Pérez-Bustillo The books traveled with Camilo everywhere, like wrinkled duendes whispering advice. The fortune-teller clawed his palm and warned him about El Salvador, where the guards search for books at the border, plucking at pages like the pockets of a bearded subversive. The books were bandits, bootlegging illicit words like Che and insurrection….
A dog's bark breaks the December ten-degree weather, a bitter dark space bleaching into a voweled ache that staccatos the thin wind, fuzzes into consciousness as a hurt. A cry ballooning in the surface of things, it's like the residue of city air left in the lung, while you search these suspenseful streets— the houses,…
After the protests began, I started running on the beach. I went up every day after work, took off my long sleeves and concealing skirts, slid into nylon shorts and a tanktop. Then I ran. Two kilometers north along the curve of the beach, followed by a swim in the warm, enervating sea. The run…
The chair breathes for hours. Off in another country, a waiter yells at me—You can't save anyone you can only save food. Plastic bags for dogs. Here's my friend at last back from the bathroom. He breathes like a chair. Save me, for I am green fruit, it is raining, and I shall fall too…
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989 No one asks where I am from, I must be from the country of janitors, I have always mopped this floor. Honduras, you are a squatter's camp outside the city of their understanding. No one can speak my name, I host the fiesta of the bathroom, stirring the toilet like a punch…
paper stars and moon three tiered houses and their utensils fast heated column of paper money lifted by ghosts the impatient and delighted spark here are two houses crackling to heaven paper rabbit lantern tinseled and sprung into celebration and from the mud bath the ghosts lay paper rice into their mouths fire dribbling down…
We're mining a vein of blue clay under the red dusty Texas topsoil, squaring up a ditch the backhoe left too rough and can't get back to. We slice at the walls with the sides of our shovels and peel up from the bottom long curls of clay that twist away like orange rind. "The…
There was a time when gas station attendants cleaned car windshields with soft blue paper towels. My dad inherited the company that made those blue paper towels, and shortly after the Arab oil embargo, due to poor financial planning, he went bankrupt. With no responsibilities in the towel business he turned to what really interested…
No products in the cart.