The needle sinks in. Cold snakes through my veins, chemistry that kills to heal. The doctor chats of skiing, how he glided along the empty, blank expanse of Commonwealth Avenue after the snowfall. I carry home a needle-deep mauve stain. As a child I had a nightmare of my mother, a black bruise on her…
Goodbye people of Armero. Never again shall you dance nor drink ale at the tiendas. Next week are scheduled no first communions no more patio piñatas; no church bells toll no idlers stroll along the Calle Mariscal Sucre. Doña Flor, her customers, will serve no more and the spade of Don José will turn no…
In the city that apparently never was—the here— where the hero dies and dies to no avail, where one is not oneself it suddenly appears (and you, who are you and are you there?) I found myself at the window at last, the room inside dark, it being late, the — outside dark, it being…
Below the barn where you practiced smooking cigarettes for days till you could do it in public like an old hand, where at twelve you lay in secret with your cousin and couldn't kiss her no matter how willing you both were, you stood that day looking back, the field perfect with snow behind you….
My foot, like a magic. bird in some fable, cleft open so suddenly, so gently— only my eyes awaken, seeing this new spring, this red, improbable river, this narrow tongue wagging where never was a mouth. Still, no pain, I walk on, until I wear the ocean's blue shoes, my ankles white with salt, and…
Ten below and falling, a record snow, wind— cold this deep this late, man, nothing crawls out from under. Logpiles, fences, hedges, trees, likely some of the innumerable neighborhood children are stalled under identical humps of snow. Each chimney flue stuck like a breathing tube through each snowcaked roof lisps the thin ascender of the…
Look she said this is not the distance we wanted to stay at—We wanted to get close, very close. But what is the way in again? And is it too late? She could hear the actions rushing past—but they are on another track. And in the silence or whatever it is that follows them there…
My father likes them hot and grows every variety known to burn the worst. Jalepenos hang in clusters like green bananas down the rows we are walking, our arms full of bread bags. Picking so many of them finally that our fingers sting and our eyes fill with water. “The little yellow ones with the…
The season turns. The trees wound the streets. We too want to be touched. We press a scab to feel the pain. Or tongue that place in the mind which yields a death. Last week, your grandfather. The old coot, 95 and every relative furious and mute by the time he was sixty. So you…
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