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.

This is the first time I've been in this mango grove,
hearing the iguaca sing, since my parents left this island

It is mid-July and I am wearing my dad’s old hat palm pava    
square and jaunty on my balding crown


quietly stealing this fleshy passion fruit, its skin warm on my palm, eager to be ******, before the jibaro with their cutting poles awaken—


these violently soft things who delight in the rude noises
made in the slush of their kissing—


their fibers glad to be forever stuck in my teeth
pretending beginnings on new beginnings.                                            

“This year, the mangoes are abundant,” my father used to say to me, his voice blending with the birdsong.

He takes a bite and hands me its yellow-red splendor
to try.  Instantly, I am heartbroken—pierced and open.

I realize, this will be my last time here in this shifting, slow heat  
and I will struggle to remember and feel what it was like  

                                            to touch and eat-- abundant mangoes.

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 red and white bobber
and a cane pole,
competing with the gulls
for the punniest sea prize.

Now he fishes
the Rogue's eternal flow,
its waters murmuring unseen truths
far from shadowy gray terns’ jeers  
that steal his peace—
fishing in steadfast streams  
that let his boots
anchor him to
the quiet pulse of home.

When the earth is no longer a womb,
just a shriek and whistle of once uttered prayer—
a long,
puncturing howl of everything
that was once you
turned into casualties of silence,
then you know
that death has arrived,
noiselessly,
silent as a missile.

All the clamor outside-
it’s the hibakujumoku,
(the survivor trees)
insisting on life
within the blast radius
of your heart.

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 white,  
and the masses of yellow blossoms  
nestled in low bushes  
lining my walk to the gravel path—  
the one leading from the woods  
to your lone grave.  

Grief is no longer larger  
than the heart of your memory,  
for around me blooms  
everything you left behind.  

I watch your granddaughter,  
small as your grave marker,  
wander past your woods  
to the open meadow beyond,  
the whiter flowers she calls  
her playthings.  

And I will follow,  
fall among those flowers,  
sink into the soft moss  
by the marsh—  
where her laughter carries echoes  
of your voice,  
where the petals hold the warmth  
of new hands.  
I will lie near the meadow’s edge,  
close to her,  
and closer still to you.

I tried on several of my father’s
old Brooks Brother suits
just 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 maybe for those old coal wingtips,
(still in their slightly battered but original box)
heels and soles worn down from hospital rounds,
the leathers evenly laced, spit and
polished to a proper navy shine,
solid and smooth, enough to go from
monolithic to Marley vinyl
without missing a beat.

I could almost hear “The Great Pretender”
play as he glided my future mom
(literally,”The Beauty Queen of Fulton Burrough”)
across the ballroom floor, and then,
suddenly stop, and leave her,
as the hospital pager buzzed on his belt.

All my father- a short, balding but
approachable looking guy, with the
devil’s goatee- ever needed to win
my mother over, was Nat King Cole.
What he left her with, was Harry Belafonte
swooning his existential sorrows out to her-
“Day-o, midnight come and I want to go home.”

I smelled the stale odor of talc
distinguishing itself from moth *****,
and was tempted to slip them on,
but figured the cost to resole them
wouldn't be worth the price. Besides,
that oxblood polish would be too hard
to find.  I left them there for the next
tenant to decide their fate.

I journey towards the night
watching the light recede.
Awaiting me, an unsteady
dreamscape of losing
things and beings
and never finding them.

But, there is also the ocean,
of waves cradling me to sleep
with the lullaby of my name’s
repetition- marooning me  
from the sound of others,
the fears, anxieties to come.

Yet, my unconscious tugs me
towards the new tomorrow, forcing
my drowsy mind to count backwards
from sixty to one, until the gravity and  
heaviness retreats into the
light and life to come—

the awakening that  turns
the dark blue inside to light blue sky,
the rising eastern glow that is
the morning star affirming
to my eyelids that this dark life
was just a dream of my fretful mind.

Awaiting me, the to-do list of my morning:
the ritual of the toilet, scale, finger ******,
Psyllium powder stirred in water, catering
to my dog’s and wife’s love language of
gourmet kibble and Nescafe— an  A.M.  life
measured out in watery tablespoons of love.

The cadence of my feet lives itself out in
thirty steps and half minute treks, a sacred
pitter-patter in rhythm with my breath that
allows the traumas of the past- the dead, the
cancers, the broken houses destroyed and rebuilt-
to exist in hidden memories and bad dreams.