Lost Time
So at some point you start to notice the difference that makes this single; a sparrow on a fallen wall, the first change of glass to drops of water, loam broken from under in a garden’s warmer corner. You start to hold the finite a coin minted and shaped, held for a last time, then spent as your body; the past like the hidden part of an iceberg; lost in...
Read MoreLeaving the Concert Hall
She is eleven, maybe twelve, but numbers no longer matter, for she has heard Bach and Mozart for the first time, has mastered the mathematics of the wind, the heart’s algebra, where A is not A and need not be, and now her fingers conduct the weather until it shivers with illuminations. She walks, then skips, then spins to a private pantomime that need not reveal itself, for she is the conductor. Silent notes come swirling around her in wizard colors of the new, and the ecstatic leaves whirl in xylophones of dance. She feels her joy float from breath to breath. Bezeled light dazzles round a...
Read MoreNameless Child
It’s a moment he must think on as he is secreted into safest sleep. The oboe descends from the lips, carrying itself from the body. When the principal violinist nods, a harmless bit of something vibrates out towards us. Its intention is to give the other musicians a block to sharpen their instruments against, a mostly forgotten progenitor of a note they chase to wear down. There is no name for this mournful song. It is not even a song, though it sounds the same each time they take it out—something before music. It holds to it the wires that reach the nerves. I close my eyes after the...
Read MoreAbd al Malik
The 14th arrondissement is proud of its Neuhof bro, the words like a double-major of classical literature and philosophy. Malik, “king,” the New African Poet transcending dyslexia, hypocrisy, moving from Christian to Muslim wishing Qu’Allah bénisse la France—may Allah bless France in a time of sorrow and sorry and hollow and now deep holes in today and, yes, even deeper hopes in...
Read MoreLiving Water
After Sunday School I threw up breakfast behind our portable classroom like it was sin, my breakfast I mean, Sugar Smacks and Tang, but at least I managed to keep it all in until we said Amen to the Lord’s Prayer. But Miss Hooker heard me outside the building, the walls are pretty thin, and watched me finish giving it up and didn’t say a word until I stopped, God bless her, because then it might’ve been tough for me to get the demons out. She’s my Sunday School teacher. If I’m ever going to marry her one day I can’t afford to be caught throwing up like...
Read MoreExcruciatingly
One day Miss Hooker will die and go to Heaven to live with the angels and God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost and all the good folks who never sinned, or not much, not enough to to go to Hell, and I wish I could say that I’m in that number but for ten years old I sin a damn-Hell of a lot, I mean everyday, if I didn’t know better I’d say I was cursed but I’m not blaming Adam and Eve though it’s probably their damn fault anyway but just myself, I guess I know the rules because Miss Hooker lays them down in class and warns us besides to take care of our eternal...
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