Regretful Memories

Unsurely, I can feel the certainty in your kiss. It lingers, like unrequited love. Hopeful, lustful, incomplete, lost.

What’s missing, your fingers play my hair as if they were piano cords.

Nothing, I breathe in. Everything, I exhale.

You taste like burnt cigarettes. And mint. I count how many stars I saw in your eyes, and I know the lightning in the sky doesn’t matter. Thunder, thunder, thunder. Bang. Bang. Bang. Rumbling thunder. You play them away. And my feet are off the ground. My skin is electrified and I realize that I am alive. Then dead. At the same time. Bliss. Is that what this is about?

Yes, you beg.



Yes and plead.

...

Published in LALUNA Magazine, Norway - April 5, 2014

The Affair

I fell in love with childhood,
he wore a red cape
made of polyester plaid,
tiny stitches of lines
circulated around his palm.
He never wore a mask,
his memories wore enough of one,
a fog remnant of a dream,
his home he’d never see again
all along the river, led up to a lake.
It didn’t matter anyway,
a wedge upon two brick walls
was a plaque – or a warning –
a memorial, perhaps, but
all succumbed to his pain,
every inch crumbled to dust.  
That’s when I took his childhood away.
I fell in love with memories.

Miscarriage

If I hadn’t stepped outside, I would not
have seen the cloud buried deep in the approaching
storm I vaguely remembering hearing about. I would
not have seen the hole in the mist, the darkest
blue splot of our baby, blasted against the
lightning heavens. I would not have heard
the coyote howl or the neighborhood dogs
bark back, bark bark barking, as if you
would eventually return their perilous cries.
I would not have had to bite my tongue
from interrupting their noises with my own one—
a single scream—all out-stretched to you as
the windy sea blew a blue cloud into
you, crushing you into the embryo, the egg,
the moment before you did not exist. I
would not have stood there on the grass,
head tipped up to where you once bud – a
cutout memory in already drifting fog – and I
would not have let the rain fall into my
open mouth as I thought about how easy
it would be, how easy it could be to finally drown.

To the Anti-American Teacher…We Knew You Were Pro-World

A clause in your contract slated your signature for patriotism.
You never signed, they never checked, but you took down your flag
after that.
They  didn’t check that either.
So, you stripped and tacked and taped and striped all the flags
from all the world to the walls.

On the east, sat Uraguay, and Paraguay, and Peru.
On the west, we went to Austria, and Hungary, and Bangladesh
for good measure.
But the north wall was your northern star – the shining one
among the rest.
The Chinese stars of social class contrasted against the five-pointed red one, the
one next to the ending of a Tsar in a February Revolution, a marking point found – not in our textbooks – but in all the places you have been.

Oh, the places you’ll go, you began.

In Israel, you had gone in your college years, and you learned of bamboo
tattoos in Thailand, but Korean was a class you completed in
France of all places, and I never had the chance to see the locations of
the south wall.

You were fired.

Over night, they tore you from the walls, lone of which, they left the
tape tacked up in four corners, a collection in each place of a flag
we once saw before us. In my desk, you slipped a map inside.

Oh, the places you’ll go, you wrote.

Such a sorrowful tune.

The Autumn Railroad

it was a place of great indifference, the type
of indifference that only happens in limbo, in the
final brush of breeze that tears a red leaf from a
stem, from a freeze-frame photograph,
that – somehow – lingers in a memory,
even though the paper was torn in half
long ago.

It was a place of great sorrow, the sultry
kind but also the kind that made kindness a
mirage or a fantasy or a dream that was beyond
all horrors due to the horror that happened there.
And when it happened – where the two tracks came
together over the bridge – where the two
boys used to bike on Sundays, where they decided
to go on Saturday instead – that’s where Autumn
never came again, that’s where the leaves never fell,
that’s where they fell to the leaves, where the leaves
don’t seem so red anymore, where anymore became
always mourn, and where morning met
the end of the road.

It was a place only for snow.

Peeling Oranges

We sat on the floor as you began, and
you told me how she showed you the way
to skin the sun in one single swoop.
But the burn you learned by yourself.

It happened when you were finished,
at the moment you pressed the peels to bitten lips,
during the time you smelt the layers stuck to your
skin.

The sticky sweetness was enough.

You explained why before speaking of Shiva,
and Ganesha and someone else I cannot remember, but
I do recall how you didn’t like it when I stepped over
your legs.

Once you asked, I would step back over, so
you could grow tall and lean, but – now –
I don’t know what you look like, whether
you grew or peeled or warned others of the burn.

I’m only left with my steps, and my inability to peel has not changed.
But I do know – now – how you shouldn’t have had to ask me to step back over,
because I never had to ask you.

You always peeled two oranges at the same time,
just so I didn’t have to burn. For that reason, I know
how you grew far above me, even back then,
tall and lean.

The grave of my teenage daughter
is a restaurant she was born at 16.
I was told she began smoking long reds for long breaks – they lasted 15 minutes at most – and she had her first sip of alcohol there. Coffee liqueur from a straw in booth 14 from a customer who later became her lover.

The next lover was the second to slap her, and following that was the first kiss she ever received from someone she admired – even though he didn’t admire her back.
It was near the gumball machine, right between the hanging claw and the golfing game. Neither had worked in years. But the lights still flickered, and she always used to talk about how the neon chants radiated across his grimace when he asked her for a kiss.

Even he knew it was only for her.
Even she knew it was never for him.
But she agreed anyway.

The waiter told me that she smoked an entire pack of Menthols after, as if to brush her teeth, but it didn’t cleanse a mint memory. It only burned it away, etched it into the cement curb where we last saw her – drinking one last time as the yellowing sky stretched over the horizon and left her smoke as ash against the morning mist.