Somewhere Near Vilna
Past where the train goes where snow mounds in the shape of caves and ovens, my father is holding one hand near an eye, tracing the sun’s rouge light in snow. Later no one will be sure why he can’t see, moves thru shadows with just his left eye. A chicken that will bleed over straw by noon the next day, nests near the foot of the bed his mother made of evergreen and patched wood. Cold spreads like oil or terror. An Aunt talks of the year there was no thaw, her skin cracked, rough as a cat’s tongue, reads to my father in candle light of a country with no snow where, if my father...
Read MoreGrandmother and Al
Once she was the only colored cook behind the counter at Woolworth. Now she heats up empty frying pans, her thoughts so scrambled that they don’t turn over easy. She clings to the scrap quilt my mama gave her. Perhaps it reminds her of time. Once she wore new suits from Joskey’s, chocolate nylon pantyhose, two inch square-toed “chu’ch” heels and hats that reached toward Heaven like the holy hands of the “sistuhs” on her pew. Now she wears urine soaked adult diapers and the green “I lost my mind in Vegas” shirt my cousin gave her last July. Once she captivated young...
Read MoreTo My Son, At 7½ Mos, From First Class
Today I must leave you for a city that, like you, will not sleep. I am burning our ancestors to get there. I am going to have the beef short ribs. I am going to buy a new hat. One day you will tell me, Dad, that hat looks silly. You will be too honest. Right now you are kicking your poor mother. She can feel you below her ribs. She forgives you in labored breaths. She forgives me that I cannot rest my hand on her womb and say, Calmate. Sheket. You know my voice through the thickness of muscle. Already you know my touch. I think you may be magic. Perhaps you are the Messiah. I leave you today...
Read MorePhotograph
My father sister and I in the trees with our hair blowing. My sister as usual has something in her hands and grins in a way no one could say no to, dancing in restaurants until she pulls in to herself at 19 like the turtles she collects. But here she’s the sweet pouter, my father’s pockets bulge with things, the gum he’ll give us in the brown chair later reading the funnies. I’ve got a little pot and my arms are heavy, my father touches us both lightly as if he’s not sure we’re...
Read MoreElevator
My hands still tremble sometimes at the drop of a voice, Dad’s disapproval Not To dialect. I am in the port of Svakia, Crete alone at a table across from the local toughs, like my high school fraternity; they send me back in time and space. “Keep away from the moving wall” the sign on the old Greek elevator says, when it’s perfectly clear, not the wall, but we are moving. I know, for now, I am my father sitting worried in fourth grade openly cheating because, he said, the test was unfair. Or was his father? He was liberated by France and its lovely wine which he doted on for years. I...
Read MoreMy Dad Comes Back as a Sparrow
on the anniversary of his death On this day with sky, not sky, but more like soil sinking into lungs, You decide to visit as a sparrow, dark earthen stripes shooting lightning shrill across your head, then racing, as summer, along your wings. Not content to sit and peer into the window’s mirror, you chat small bird news to those beyond And tilt your bead eyes into my room, throat opening up to tell of ice and hard, rich pellets ant-sealed within the feeder’s varnish, Of how one boxelder bug stops to lure with fiery wings, propped safe inside, within a flowerpot. You stop and lift...
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