Tag Archive for: Poetry

This kind of freedom

On what epidemiologists would later mark as the single deadliest day of the early 21^st Century in America, Sophie was drinking gin and tonics and dozing off by the pool at the place in the Poconos she was housesitting  for three nights for three hundred bucks. It had six bedrooms and three bathrooms. The couple who owned it had left Sophie a fully stocked bar and fridge. No pets to care for. A security system. All the entertainment subscriptions. A hundred-dollar Visa gift card to order takeout, plus a chest freezer in the garage with pizza, ice cream, mac ’n cheese, and dumplings. 

Two years later, alone in her small West Philly apartment with long Covid, which her health insurer wouldn’t acknowledge as a real thing, eating eighty-four cent ramen that used to cost thirty-two, hoping her shitty older brother who lived across the city in their dead parents’ house was, at the very least, worried about her sometimes, Sophie remembered what the tan handsome husband  had said years ago outside that huge empty house the day he and his wife got back from one of their many pandemic getaways: “We have a such a beautiful country! It’s important for us all to get out and see it, you know? I really hope you get to someday, when you’ve earned this kind of freedom for yourself.”

Alight, Astray

The six of us skipped school and found ourselves tip-toeing east on the sidewalk trash like each bit was a stepping stone. Downtown we observed Mr. Tuesday trying to witch someone’s finances with angry moths and diseased cats, saw him batting at smoke-and-mirror joy with tentacles and tongs, gnashing despair between his teeth. It was hard not to stare as he let the day flog him and his colleagues chained to the feet of another Tuesday, those who live to keep the wealth-floated buoyant, who walk backwards slowly each morning to the elevator the chair and desk to present face present teeth present the daily stagecraft of the unspoken echoing within. We stole a fancy lunch and saw the sky not wondering at all if a thing like Tuesday was happening, or if paths lead into parking garage shadows, the salvation of sleep, or the families in apartments all day together chewing one another’s loneliness. My skin sucked no emotion from what we saw, but as we escaped it, like tourists, I felt absolutely elated to know none of us would ever work downtown. The wind left more trash behind us. We collapsed on our front steps. Someone smashed the last bottle. Everyone cheered. I dropped a cigarette to burn the path we’d taken.

Sixth Street

The houses on Sixth Street are identical, white teeth in a jaw that never closes. Their lawns are shaved to the same length, sprinklers hissing like snakes. Windows stay shut, blinds tilted just enough to catch light, never enough to reveal who is watching.

The cars feed first. Four-wheeled monsters, they roar down the pavement, chewing asphalt, spilling their drivers into the waiting mouths of houses. Doors slam, lights extinguish, and the street swallows them whole. By morning, only silence remains.

The world shifts outside, but Sixth Street does not. It runs in circles, refusing to escape. Neighbors pass one another with blurred faces, as if erased by the same hand that drew the cul-de-sac. Sometimes a door shrieks. Sometimes a window cracks. But most days the silence grows fat and heavy, pressing against every ribcage.

Inside, the storm builds. It pounds to get out, but rebellion here is devoured as quickly as it appears. A glass shattered on the driveway is gone by morning, ground into gravel by the street’s slow tongue. A porchlight left burning too late is swallowed by dawn. Slammed doors are absorbed into the endless hum of siding and shingles.

Only human connections resist for a moment. A hand brushing a cheek in the dark. A smile across a crowded room. A knee pressed against another knee beneath the table. These small gestures glow like embers. 

Every touch is rebellion. 

Monday Morning, 9:05am Outside Reproductive Choices, South London

Edith unfolded her garden chair and settled in. She had her Thermos, raincoat and book – it might be a long day.

            The first woman hurried inside alone, head down, heels rat-a-tatting. Edith’s fingers twitched on the paperback, but she stilled, knowing she wasn’t needed yet.

            A few minutes later another woman appeared, tear creased, leaning on a man. Edith waited.

            The door was swinging shut when they turned up, with their filthy placards and Virgin Mary, like she wasn’t a sexual assault victim.  

            Behind them lurked a lone girl, slowing, glancing from the protestors to the clinic door, her face frozen. She couldn’t be more than twenty. Edith stood, the chair creaking as loud as her knees.

            “Murderer,” one protestor shouted at the girl.

            “Mummy,” another called, high pitched.

            The girl looked like she might turn and run.

            Edith hurried over, as fast as she could with her arthritic hip. The girl flinched, but Edith made a shooing motion at the protestors. The two women fell into step together. Edith tried to stay calm, despite the hitch of the girl’s sobs and the insults flung as casually as firecrackers.

            When it was too hard Edith thought of her son, Callum, forced into her then snatched away, red faced and squalling, without her having any say.

            Who knew what had happened to him.

            And this poor girl. Who knew what had happened to her.

The Inevitable Truth of the California Dream

You’re seven years old at a campsite when you try to pick the golden poppy.

“Don’t do that,” your mother says before your fingers close around the stem. “You can’t do that in California.”

For the past week, all you’ve been able to do is watch a video of a piano teacher play “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” from Piano Adventures 3A. She messes up at the thirty second mark but does not edit it out. She does not do a retake. It is a fifty-three second piece. Her right hand falters after the error. How humiliating to make a mistake on a song from Piano Adventures 3A.

Even though you can’t bring yourself to clip your nails or wash your face, you are in the car with Saraya, hurdling seventy miles per hour up I-80 towards Reno. She is made up pretty with black eyeliner that looks like kohl, and you think you would like to have your brain stirred up and removed through your nose. “There’s a comedian tonight,” Saraya says. “He finally broke out of New York.”

Between California and Reno, there is nothing but hills and the dimmest evergreens you’ve ever seen. A pulped skunk sticks to the side of the road. A woman parks her car to scrape it off.

“I’ve always wanted to be a comedian,” Saraya says, “but I’m not funny.” Even her attempts at self-deprecation are pathetic.

This trip was supposed to cheer you up, but it is taking everything not to throw yourself out of the car and join the skunk.

It would have taken less than a minute to rerecord the video.

The car stutters. A rock skitters behind it onto the empty road. “That wasn’t an animal, was it?” Saraya says. A quarter mile ahead, a lone sign welcomes you to Nevada. The car jumps. There’s a hiss. Saraya jerks the wheel. You hope she will swerve left and leave the two of you steaming in a ditch, but she swerves right, and you skid across the dirt and weeds until the brakes kick in and you bang into the dashboard.

You get out of the car.

Neither of you are hurt. Saraya kneels by the popped tire and prods it for a nail.

Maybe it was the seventh time she’d restarted the video. Maybe it had taken hours. Maybe she’d watched her finger move astray, knowing it was fate, and accepted that no matter what she did, her pinky was always destined to strike that B.

On each side of the border sign, there is a golden poppy. Saraya curses behind you. You walk to the first poppy reach down, then remember. You step past the sign. Welcome to Nevada.

Beneath your fingers, the stem snaps so easily.

Hanging, still hanging, gone

The metallic grey Nissan covered in ads for the Juliet & Romeo Matchmaking Agency has held the same spot in the Safestore parking lot for months, and the frayed rope stuck to the neighbour’s windowsill still has a lanky Santa puppet holding on by one hand. I couldn’t blame you for thinking everything looked right in its place in December, but it’s almost spring now, and I can’t be the only one seeing the lingering signs of decay.

You once told a room full of people that I always notice the things no one else does; you said it like you held the key to the best thing about me they couldn’t know. Now, you shoot me worried looks from the side of your eye, and I see who I’ve become to you: a lost cause, a stubborn child, hurling dull-edged words at a wall of silence. 

Within a week of us moving in, the old lady with the gaudy Christmas display knew how long we’d been together and what our dogs were called. I couldn’t help being scared of finding out what else she’d learnt about us. Every time I crossed the street to avoid walking past her door, I wondered if she was behind the curtains, looking straight at me not looking back. That was before you started calling me paranoid; before someone planted the For Sale sign in her yard; before I could think of only one reason she would leave one of her marionettes behind.

These days, I get the feeling that the next time I’ll remember to check in on Santa I’ll be on my own. I wonder how I will find him. Hatless, hair and beard waving in the wind. Capsized and drenched in rain. Tangled in his ladder turned noose. Hanging, still hanging, gone.

Desert Squall

In the split second before the rainstorm unleashes, I see your neon-yellow, oblong vehicle. You’ve arrived early. 

            I click my tongue, release seat belt. Water drips over my arm, plop-plop-plop―the moonroof needs sealing. I’ve never thought to fix the problem since this is Phoenix, with 300 days of sunshine a year. Today, a rare desert squall pounds and my compact sedan shudder-judders, reminds me you and I met in a tube-like elevator that rattle-shook in the seconds before it halted, suspending us between floors five and six. 

            I squint through the downpour. Becky’s office is dark―the wedding planner isn’t in. We’re here to hand our separate guest lists so she can organize the seating chart for our daughter’s reception. You open your car door and I hiss, “What on earth?” 

            Much later in our failed marriage, I understood you turn into a Bollywood hero when you’re trying to score. In that stalled elevator, you reassured me first before taking charge. You banged on the metal door, then called for help, first from your phone then mine―cell phones were relatively new then―and when you couldn’t find a signal, you hit the emergency button on the panel, again and again. After marriage, you tossed all desire to impress me. 

            You run on the wet concrete, an out-of-shape man in his fifties, a triangular box held over your head, computer bag slung over your shoulder. Shirt soaked, hair dripping wet, you open my passenger-side door, slip in. 

            “No point waiting in separate cars,” you say. “Did you have time for lunch? I got you pizza.” 

            I stare at the odd-shaped box, likely the doggy-bag from a meal you shared with your girlfriend. 

            When the elevator jolted to a stop, I wobble-crashed against your strong, muscular frame. In that moment, I couldn’t identify what petrified me more: being alone with a stranger in the enclosed space, the sense of suffocation, or the cloying darkness. We disentangled quickly, but once you’d contacted building maintenance, you reached for my hand, held it in your warm palm, speaking comforting words in a husky, intimate voice. My stupid heart’s runaway emotions betrayed me, swelling and filling my ribcage as we dangled between floors five and six, until rescue arrived. For years after, your dinner-party conversation started: “When I met my future wife, I was so stunned, not just my pulse, but the elevator stopped too.” 

            Odors of aftershave and dank, wet clothes overwhelm my car. I notice the bald spot on your crown and that you’re wearing a pink shirt. Your girlfriend’s younger than I am by a decade; she likely picked that shade. I open the pizza box. The slice is a tight fit; melted cheese has slid off the pie, glued itself to the cardboard. “Pizza should come in a square box,” I say, fling the box with its unappetizing contents on the back seat. 

            You hold a hand up to my car’s ceiling, capture dripping water. “Why don’t you get this repaired? I’ll call my auto shop.” There it is, that long-discarded exhibition of attention, of caring, that once captivated me. You grab my box of Kleenex from the floorboard, wipe dashboard, gear shaft, console. 

            You unzip your computer bag, fish out a document. “My list isn’t long,” you say, adding, “How can I help with the wedding? ”

             I play with the car’s turn-signal lever: up-down-up-down, peer at the wedding planner’s still-dark office, shrug. “Ask Becky.” 

            “Why won’t you eat the pizza?” you press. Ache-filled images pop into my head: a laden dinner table, a kitchen clock that displays 10:00 p.m, me curled up on the couch, rectangles of cut-up lasagna in Tupperware containers, rows of stacked dinner leftovers in my freezer. 

            Today, you’re urging me to eat soggy, cold, cheese-denuded pizza in my leaky car.

            “By the way, my mother’s coming a week before the wedding.” Deft as a fencer, you slide in the information.

            I massage the circle of the steering wheel with my fingers. 

            “She’s the bride’s grandmother,” you say.

             I grip the steering wheel tight. The mother-son strife is not my concern anymore, nor the fact that nothing about you pleases the lady: not your job, not your home, not your appearance. 

            “Umm. . .” your hesitation makes my breath shrivel. “I didn’t tell her we’re divorced.” 

            A howling gust of wind hits the car. You place your hand on mine, like you did in the elevator. Your large palm is warm, like it was then. You lean close, like you did then. I can feel your breath fanning my ear, like I did then. By the time the elevator doors opened, I’d succumbed. 

            I extricate my hand from under yours.

            “Didn’t or couldn’t?” I bang my fists on the steering wheel. 

            “How can she stay with us in the apartment?” you ask. Us: you and your girlfriend. “Can my mother stay with you, please? Let’s avoid unpleasantness.”

            After that rush of words, you place your hand on my cheek. 

            I’m about to shout, “Unpleasantness for whom?” when I see Becky walking up to her office.

            I brush your hand away. The rain has ceased as suddenly as it arrived. When the elevator doors opened, I offered you my phone number. Now, I step out. I’ll give Becky my guest list and leave. At the office entrance, I turn. You continue to sit in my car, wiping down fogged windows with Kleenex.