You don’t remember his name, his appearance, anything about him. You remember only the glistening incision in front of his freshly-shaven hairline, snaking back along the symmetry of his skull and ending near the onset of the spinal column. Later that night, you take your index finger to the center of your own forehead and run it clockwise to the cervical vertebrae. You pretend. Because it could have been you.
Read MoreIt was sometime after Easter, when spring grows heavier, the earth a bloated womb. My father, one of spring’s miscarriages. I drove home from school to see him. The couch in the living room was gone—that tattered, sunken thing permeated with my father’s smells and the little mountain range of indentations his body carved the way we mold to fit against a lover. My mother and father didn’t sleep separately out of contempt.
Read MoreIn between hotel sheets, stiff and crunchy under me, and the impossible blackness of a room without the faint glow of moonlight, I lay, naked. My eyes are open, but useless, and in my blindness I feel silly and exposed, despite the shelter our thick hotel curtains provide. I stare at the ceiling, willing it to answer the voice in my head, the What are you doing?
Read MoreIt wasn’t at a crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to be a great blues musician, and it wasn’t like the virtuoso violinist Niccolò Paganini who supposedly sold his soul to the devil to be the best violinist to have walked the earth. It was actually by accident when I was buying a violin for the first time.
Read MoreI don’t like to answer the telephone.
“Hi Mom. It’s Cary.”
The familiar voice jolts me back to a nightmare. The voice of my first-born child. My precious son. Love and terror.
Read MoreYou can see through my dress. It clings to me in pieces and reveals just enough. I can move in this dress, walk down streets, perch on subway benches, sit cross-legged in sand. Because of this dress a Coney Island man plowed into a street sign, a truck driver howled from the other side of the Henry Hudson Parkway, prick in hand, and someone tossed a bucket of water on me from a second story window to see my underthings.
Read MoreI remember you in particular in the cold. In the snow. Though I seem to think the last time that we spoke it was raining. I recall rivulets running down the windows of your car. So much motion outside as we were so still inside. Even our mouths stiff and unresponsive. Mostly, though, you are the late fall to me, that soft sort of snow.
Read MoreGibbons are monogamous and bond in pairs. Orangutans are solitary and, for the most part, mate coercively. Males with large cheek pads called flanges are able to attract willing, in-heat females with long mating calls. Unflanged males must search for partners.
Read MoreA banjo player I met in that place told me once he was the seventh son of a seventh son. I never told him his name was the same as my brother’s middle name, the same as my mother’s first brother’s: a small boy, overexposed in the photographs left in my grandparents’ house. Influenza closed the small boy’s throat a few months before my mother’s seventh birthday. She heard it happen through the bedroom wall.
Read MoreI remember a long night in Africa when I called you during the midnight shift before you went to class. I could see the night sky through the window and it was the first time I noticed the Milky Way and felt the distance between us like the galaxy feels the gravity of the black hole at its center. I feared a love with that magnitude and believed I wasn’t worth waiting three years for, so I broke up with you under the weight of those same stars.
Read MoreBut when I imagine my mother’s mother, all I can see is her tying an apron around her waist, and there is a dark smudge in the middle, like how some old White crowds stood watching the swinging knot around someone’s neck that my mother’s mother knew. And yet still, she soaked her hands—wrinkled and wet—the brined black leather in the blinking soapsuds, washing china, and other plates, from other places she would never go.
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