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.

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.