The empty lot of the abandoned car dealership
is overrun with dandelions, thistles, and sticker weeds.

On the right is a Baptist church standing
sternly against the invasive plants.  

The ministry’s gardener sprays Roundup
on the weaker creepers while his assistant
uses a torch on the deeply rooted ones.  

On the left is a BBQ specializing in Nashville Hot Chicken.  

Congregants fill the abandoned spaces on Sundays,
parking in every white-lined spot.  

On weekdays, the meat, pork, and poultry adherents
occupy the fringes of the cracked tarmac.

Saturdays are the days for the wildflowers to bloom,
the sticker weeds to cling to the cuffs of children’s pants,
and the hindquarters of every sniffing dog.

Church festival days were the time for the lot to be filled
with popcorn, churro, and taco carts-
ring toss, balloon pop, and fish bowl toss booths-
a bounce house, and the heroes of the Bible
obstacle course for the children.

Halloween week was the one time the BBQ joint
had the lot to itself. It erected a tent of horror
filled with demons, bedsheet ghosts, and demented chainsaw-wielding dwarves. The finale featured
the patrons being strapped to an altar and exorcised
by a defrocked priest and ******* clad nuns.

The other scary ride was the tunnel of love and marriage.  Couples were faux-married by a maniacal judge and,
by the end, were divorced by the jurist’s serial killer twin. What happened in between the nondisclosure agreements everyone signed kept it all private and secret.

Since the horror house made a lot of money and the church received a large sponsor donation,    
the deacons ignored the false sins and degradations.
  
Anyway, by Monday, the altar was gone,  
the neon horror tent collapsed and  
the sticker weeds reclaimed their corners,  
waiting for the next act.

Most days, I drive past it all—the sermons,
the spice rub, the ghost  dealership, the exorcisms,  
and I wonder if this patch of cracked asphalt  
knows what it is. Or if it even matters.

But nothing stops the dandelions from
dancing in the breeze and car exhaust air,
singing their minor chord hallelujahs to life.
        
On Sundays the faithful return to their pulpits.
By Fridays, the altar is a karaoke stage,  
with the pastor belting out “Highway to Hell”  
between deep-fried sermons.

I don’t worry how my old clothes  
will look on their new owners at Goodwill.  
They have places to be,  
stories to live  
beyond my closet.  

Still, letting go feels strange.  
I hesitated at the donation bin,  
fingers brushing fabric worn soft  
by years of routine.  
Shirts that carried me through long days,  
pants that held their shape  
even when I didn’t,  
sweaters that wrapped me in warmth  
when I needed comfort.  
Familiar, reliable—  
but clothes, like memories,  
aren’t meant to be hoarded.  

And maybe, I realize,  
I am ready to let them go—  
ready to make space  
for the person I am becoming,  
not just the one I have been.  

Now, my shirts might end up  
on a college kid,  
worn soft from late-night study sessions,  
coffee stains mapping out  
their ambitions.  

My pants could find a new home  
with a dad who needs extra pockets  
for snacks, keys, and crumpled receipts  
from weekends spent chasing his kids.  

A Dolphins t-shirt might land  
in the hands of someone  
who doesn’t even watch football,  
but wears it anyway  
because it fits just right—  
or because aqua and orange  
make them feel bold.  

Some pieces will travel far,  
stuffed into suitcases  
heading toward new cities,  
new jobs, new beginnings.  
Others will stay close,  
worn by someone  
who just needed  
a warm sweater on a cold night.  

I won’t know where they go,  
but I like to think they’ll be loved,  
threadbare in all the best ways,  
living new lives  
I’ll never see.  

And as I walk away,  
hands empty, closet lighter,  
I expect to feel loss—  
but instead, I feel space.  
Room for new stories,  
new routines,  
new warmth—  
not just in fabric,  
but in the quiet that remains.  

Maybe I’ll fill it with something new,  
or maybe I’ll leave it open,  
letting the quiet remind me  
that not everything needs replacing.  
That sometimes,  
emptiness is its own kind of comfort,  
a soft place to grow into something new.

I dialed the landline to my childhood home,  
let it ring into the past—  
again and again and again

I knew my parents wouldn’t answer.
They're both dead.
Still, the ringing soothed—  
each unanswered tone
a promise that someone,
anyone, might answer.

After ten rings, a recorded message came on.
The voice was full of girly twang
and the snap and pop of bubble gum.

The voice I heard was nothing like my mother.  
It was the mother I once imagined—  
carefree, untouched by the cigarette rasp,  
free of the heavy, deliberate tone  
that braced against disappointment.  
Not the chant of a woman  
who saw no promise in herself, only in her children.

Beyond my window, a sparrow circles,  
returning to the nest it has built—  
a place that still remembers its shape.  

The message ended.  
I let the silence stretch,  
listened to the emptiness  
on the other end,  
then hung up.

I noticed the heat bending
through the window's refraction
wondering if revisiting the past  
quenches nostalgia for the dead,  
gives my parents a proper ending.

I watched other people mowing my small lawn
under a bright sky,
listened to Spanish pop blaring from tiny speakers,
the music drowning out the din
of nail guns attaching shingles
to all the houses being built beyond.  

I move with the moment,
opening the window
to take in the scent of just-clipped grass,
dancing awkwardly to this music with lyrics
I can barely hear in a language
I'm learning to understand—  
laughing until my belly hurts

Like everyone else,
I can only step through the gate
my mother and father took to enter this world.
I must exist in the space their bodies made.  

Their walk set my path and determined my streets.
I hear their voices in the crunch of the compressed gravel of every footfall—echoes of their stories
I lived and never lived.

Where the dust remembers their steps,
I wander off until the road narrows,
and no clear way forward forces me to double back.  

What remains of them clings to me—
their names,  gestures, their quiet inheritance.
I step forward, but the gate never closes behind me.

Things are going as planned.  
My mother died.  
My father died.  
I am alive
and bound to fate

I recite the mantra to myself:  
"A father is fate,"  
drawing the Harrow  
along my fetid soul,  
turning over what was planted in me,  
digging up the weight of his will.

But a counterchant arises,
the one I will use
as the border wall
against this seeding:
“A mother is the memory of mystery."
Her voice plants itself in the silence,  
a reseeding against the pull of his fate,
a defiance growing in the spaces he left behind.

Perhaps that is why my parents died the proper way,  
never knowing how the mystery  
of their three childless children’s lives  
would resolve itself.  
Perhaps they believed  
things left unresolved,  
questions left unanswered,  
were never meant to be—  
that silence itself was an inheritance.  

We were all improper boys in their eyes,
following their path—
but only far enough to leave the family herd behind.
I was the easy one,
the silent, observant child,  
the one who did not rebel,  
but carried no mystery or fate in him,
only the moral weight of a conflicting inheritance.

My father died in peace,
leaving no holes in his life,
not even a burial, just his ashes.
And his boys with all
the usual unresolved regrets,
the proper amount of moral pain
to grieve him properly.

My mother’s death was the pit
in the universe that opened up
a thirty year hell in her sons. She left a mess-
sickly, poor, and with nothing to grant
but her good memories and a moral clarity
torn to tatters by the unscrupulous.

The older took to drugs trying to give her justice.
The younger was too innocent of mind
to truly know and care.  And as far as myself,
the silent observant, middle one—

there are reasons
good mothers die
and poems are meant
to live forever—

there are reasons.

I walked to the end of the pier
and could not throw your ashes into the sea.

It was easy with my father—
to see his blackness float in the air
and settle on the wrack line,
neither the earth nor sea’s possession.

But you, dear friend, my lost sister
not of the soul but of pain, solitude, loneliness,
of God demanding that I love the abandoned,
I can not throw back only to see you
return to me a wounded speckled fish.

The tide against the timber piles beat their hieroglyphics, scattering the swans on your urn to the nearest oblivion.
The sky’s darkness matches your grey ashes,
and the grit of the sea’s salt renders you colorless
as my hand skims over your lightness.

I cried, realizing you would never become
water, wind, or earth.
You would be just a swimmer caught in a riptide,
struggling to escape by navigating to the shore,
always coming back to me enough to pull you safely through
as you trusted I would do,
knowing God left me no other choice.  

Hooked to me, I carry your wound
as I watch schools of silverfish
swimming away from the pier.
I cap your urn,  cradling your ashes
to the warmth of my side.  
“I would never be through,”
I whispered to your ashes,
the sky, my silent father,
                      to myself.

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 the first after school Cinnabon
Delights clutched and munched
in little fingers.

I'll lean in whenever a raven haired Circe
at a corner table, resembling Sabrena—
that witch who first broke my heart—
casts a disdainful glance my way.

They’ll tug at the corners of their
bad girl leather jacket, gather
their familiar charms, and
shoot me a bird as
they vanish in
the smoke of
memory.

And then, on some evenings, customers
with my mother’s laugh will walk in
and then out, their arms cradling
grease-slicked terracotta bags,
sacred relics in the
fluorescence.

The smell of cheap tacos in brittle shells
filled with Hamburger Helper,
gummy cheese, old lettuce,
canned diced tomatoes-
that heavenly mess
masquerading as
a meal would
pull me back  
to her
cocina.    

In the haze of the Taco Bell fryers, the grease
sings of her failures and resilience.  Like her,
I would smile through it all—always
apologizing yet always trying—
in the end,  scraping meat
off chipped plates

remembering my mother’s taco shells and
refusing to wipe away the grease,
letting it linger an echo of
loves imperfect folds.