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Family & Ancestorsexpand_moreMy son trims a curtain of lashes, immures them into a stray year.
“I think he does not care for art; I fancy he has not even read Pushkin.”
The almanac tells them when the moon passes into ghost weather.
There was no sense in brushing off or any other civilized thing.
The peanut seller tore sheets out of paperback books to make the cones.
I shoved them one by one, easy as pie yet with care, just shy of mercy.
How welcome my birth must have been to the raw soldier.
For my vacation last summer, I visited the Bateer family in Xiwuqi.
My grandfather committed my grandmother to a mental asylum.
Neither blood nor belonging accounted for my presence in Ghana.
Lebanon’s dreams of a homeland were fading with every rocket launch.
Marie was therefore exiled, as it were, like Cordelia in the old play.
The hawk moves out of the way to let a little hot package of breath rise up.
They went to pray for the dead. It was important to shed some tears.
Felicia knew why he was there. He was waiting. Waiting for her.
“We see you tryin’ to hide. Ain’t no use tryin’ to hide in God’s House.”
“Maybe you should leave the rumba to those who know how to do it.”
In Florence I gained a sense of how I might want to spend my life.
Widow. I look up the etymology. To separate, split, cleave, divide.
The guy who drove the mother to the morgue hands him an empty. Nostrils a little raw, displaced, conscripted, by your Shock and Awe.
My daughter’s favorite game is Holocaust. She’s quite inventive.
Is she dreaming of the rivers soft with codling in her hometown?
It was true. We would probably never visit that place again.
I grabbed him by the face and told him life only comes to a person once.
She is very rich. She will leave me everything when she dies, he says.
The chocolate was old, dusty white, the way chocolate gets after many years.
How much, I thought, such stolid suffering resembles love. Planets don’t change direction as easily as love.
The stones here carry the island’s low cry inside them. A landlocked grief.
It’s there and then it’s gone, just light through the window.
Since I am in my seventies, it is now or never, and I know it.
