Tag: connection
-
Landline
I dialed the landline to my childhood home, let it ring into the past— again and again and againI knew my parents wouldn’t answer. They’re both dead. Still, the ringing soothed— each unanswered tonea promise that someone, anyone, might answer. After ten rings, a recorded message came on.The voice was full of girly twang and…
-
Abundant Mangoes
This is the first time I’ve been in this mango grove, hearing the iguaca sing, since my parents left this islandIt is mid-July and I am wearing my dad’s old hat palm pava square and jaunty on my balding crownquietly stealing this fleshy passion fruit, its skin warm on my palm, eager to be sucked,…
-
Rogue Brother
My brother is an angler devoted to the stream that pools around long boots, making the slow cast that gently whips and ripples the surface with a reel that knows the proper weight of the scales below.Gone are the days when he fished Crandon Pier while sitting on an overturned paint bucket with a cheap…
-
A Son’s Lament
It’s been over thirty-five years since I felt your motherly touch, and I no longer try to shape a garden of sorrow. Instead, I let the new grass flame, its green distinct from the old cold fire, whose embers tighten their ring with each passing year. I find joy in the crepe myrtles unfolding into…
-
After the Birds: Home
Birds know the way home,the door that has their name or how to sing it into existence, if lost.Through it they find each othereven in a burning world—they find their being. And in that last lost skythey sing it into their feet,combine it with the dirt’s prophecy.Look up in the sky, at the birds and…
-
A Hole in the Bucket
My mother was always a better singer than she was a cook. She may have burnt a lot of things but never missed a note, especially when Harry Belafonte came on the transistor kitchen radio-a voice so pure it made her cry with joy.“There’s a hole in the bucket dear Liza, dear Liza,” he sang…
-
Sonder
I watch my shadow disentangle from the light to plead for its life with the oak’s penumbra and the rising sun, the stride of leashed dogs, bicycle wheels and othersilhouettes, evaporating in the park’s heat. In the artificial lake beyond, a one-man sculls theunobscured water, its paddles leaving clear streams behind.Five strokes later the craft…
-
Walking Along the Bay Beach at Night
The dusty stars above, the stars in waves besides,where the very sand is dust.The bay is the nightinseparable from the starsand the winding coastline,the brilliant creatures tide-linedin the black sands swirlsas we walk in their darkness—star ash, beyond the life watch,the dusty light of their spiralaway from the swish and spill,the other walkers walking back,holding…