Tag: nostalgia
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Walking My Dog Without My Glasses
Walking My Dog Without My GlassesI depend on my four-legged little boy to navigate the blurwhen I’m out walking the neighborhood without my glasses.I follow the leash—him tugging me off course,left, then sideways—nose deep in something rich and rude but insistent.Yesterday, it was a brown squirrel disappearing into leaf-shadow,a harem of dogs perfumed by musk…
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Snow Globes
Snow Globes There are tableaux we make out of dinner plates, a child’s lost sock,a father’s coat on the bannister,the silent, stuck smile of a motherstirring steam into endless errands—windows frosting into the same patterns,altars of dusty decades accumulating unnoticed in twice told stories, reupholstered sorrows,all the slow cyclones of repetition caught under glasswaiting for…
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Walking in the Rain
Walking in the RainI don’t know why rain breaks my heart.No one I loved ever died on a rainy day.In my life, it has become an elegy to sunshine.Maybe, it’s because rain feels like tears.I go outside when it reduces to a soft drizzle,just before the scent of petrichor has settled into the earth,my dog…
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Vessels
VesselsThe pots remembered emptiness,remembered the ache of hunger,how they were born to forestall famine,to be filled and filled again,to feed mother, father, the children.not this silent, stew-less simmer.When the kitchen faucet dripped out of rhythm,the backsplash tile sprinkled dustonto the dirty water,onto the tarnished coreof the lonely pans sitting stagnant in the sink,they almost felt…
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Waiting for Birds on Lemonade Street
Is the day perfect if there are no birds to wake you but there is lemonade? or if you live on Lemonade Street but there are no birds on electric lines because the utilities are underground. no birds twittering in trees just the sweet sour taste of lemonade puckering your mouth the scent of bonnie…
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Between the Waves
Between the Waves There was never a single border, only the shifting tide of language, guavas glowing in the heat, the churn of Spanglish rolling in before the tide could pull it back. At the checkout line, the cashier asks, “Paper or plastic?”—so simple, so sharp. I glance at Mamá, but her words stick, caught…
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My Jesus Hour in a Taco Bell
I feel at home at Taco Bell, as the cuisine echoes the worst of my mom’s cooking: cheese that tastes like beans, beans that taste like rice, rice that tastes like flour.It’s where I go when I am missing someone, usually near their Jesus’ hour, between the last sip of a lunch hour Pepsi and…
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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,…
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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…
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Trying on My Dad’s Wingtips
I tried on several of my father’s old Brooks Brother suitsjust before his funeral, trying to save myself the expense of an outfit I didn’t need. Each was too tight on the collars. too short on the sleeves, each crotch inseam strangled my manhood.I had outgrown them all.Almost all of it will go to Goodwill-except…
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New New York City Skyline
In the mist, black granite, linked scales melt away—memories of Times Square,Broadway’s past.From afar, the tinkle of a music box is heard—a hopeful melody,almost a lullaby.Below-The street pleads a prayer to the broken sky—“just a haunting,gentle touch.”The morning breaks over two towers built and rebuilt-over coffee, doughnuts—old promises kept,new promisesbroken and rebroken.Yet, there is the…
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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…
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This Old House Knows Me Well
This old house painted in faded pride knows me well. I did not learn to walk here,but I did learn to leap- and do it mightily.The old dishes have been broken or thrown away,replaced by new ones with new owners. The taps stiff with old age and rust, surely have been replaced.The comfortable chairs, the…
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Naturalization (a cento after Snighda Korala: Fragments on Naturalization)
Malus Sieversii, your tiny apple seeds spread long before I came. The Silk Road away from you tumid with less blood, grief. Ad Domestica,the pale veil of a whole life waiting—before that. (Malus sieversii is a wild apple native to the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan. It has recently been shown to be…
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Nostalgia
They would feel it, every new moment- the echoes of who they use to be and what was once theirs-now dirty sheets caught in a dark tree.Everyday, the black river rolls by in blue remembranceand lilies float and drown in the burning stream.Here, the air hurts in the light of a browning sunand the stars…