Brook McClurg

Spring meant nothing in drought-stricken Southern California. Seasons passed unnoticed. Look left, right. Wait for the tourists to change. We ran kissing each other, them, hanging out of Jeeps and low-riders, flying the riverbed past curfew. The electricity of skin-on-sunburned-skin begging for eucalyptus relief and a fingertip’s graze; tussled hair and chapped lips soothed by the moisture of strangers. Every relationship lasted the theme park length of a line.

Easter sweltered, the chocolate eggs and jelly beans melting into the lawn before they could be collected. April showers came brief if at all. June gloom burned off by noon but only locals knew started in May. The spirit-dampening marine layer was but a half-day sentence; the beach still, just later.

I left. Several times and each time for longer, I left, until my own transience became constant. A circus coming through town: tent up, tent down.

I returned this El Niño year to a superbloom even Death Valley couldn’t avoid. Life sprouted in verdant greens, goldenrods and fuchsias: the slender phlox and desert parsley of the Antelope Valley, chia on the Carrizo Plain and a pink chaparral currant pouring through Placerita. On a map the spots are an outbreak that resemble a backslash that mimics California’s Cartesian tilt: left to right, and downward, a floral fault line dividing coast and desert.

Angelenos and tourists alike are careless and heavy-footed, trampling the foliage for a #poppies picture above what is—most seasons—the ugliest lake in the state. Park rangers bemoan the off-path liberties taken. People pretend not to hear. Someone lands a helicopter in the valley because traffic. Why must we love things to death?

Homogenization is a process of reduction. Through pressure, one thing is made small enough so as not to be noticed in the other. This is how I feel on streets once familiar: Encroached upon. Invisible. Unkissable. From a beach overlooking newly strip-malled PCH, I avoid eye contact, hide from exes as surely as they would me. I determine not to turn if I hear my name, but nobody calls it.

Nobody knew where all the fathers went. Most of us had never even seen one. Since birth we’d heard tales of their ilk, what uses they served when their numbers thrived—a nostalgia for a vague before that we couldn’t

pin down—but it had to be explained to us, like math, what one was even for. A geometry of absence. We saw men, of course, but this wasn’t the same. Mom said something mystical about fatherhood turned a man’s insides soft, made them skittish, an enchantment that caused their legs to twitch and often disappeared them. She also said I could be hyperbolic about it. Still, in my neighborhood it was not unusual for us kids to try to crack the case. We were sleuths investigating the particulars of our own story, intuiting their unspoken communal connections.

Our clubhouse was a commandeered shed in an abandoned patch of grass by the furniture factory at the end of our street. Solvents and cedar sawdust wafted above the barbed-wire fence, passed the kitten graveyard and into our meetings, where we’d convene to discuss club business. Gone Dads club. We compared notes of vanishings that varied wildly, but the end result was always the same. Oso was adamant: it was an alien abduction-type situation. Others argued that if this were the case, all fathers would have left at the same time. They didn’t. We crossed it off the list. Eagle blamed it on Pachamama, said the earth was a goddess mother who shook and shook until all the dad’s fell off her face, prolly cause they weren’t where they said they’d be when they said they’d be. We all nodded and agreed that moms could be like that. But then why aren’t all the dad’s floating in space when the shuttles launch? Birdie asked. The only thing we were obsessed with more than dads, was space. We crossed that off, too.

Most moms wouldn’t even discuss a fast-talking, skirt-chasing, fly-by-the-seat- of-their whoosh, where’d their pants go—dad unless pushed. Even then, their stories were fishy. The club could easily poke holes. Some were returning soon, but only if we behaved. Transparent. Some we were supposedly happy to be rid of, but their shirts remained pressed and hung in the closet. Some dads were off fighting in the war when there wasn’t one. Some were in prison or otherwise lost at sea, but all were flotsam. Moms must have had their own meetings, too, because whatever the story—they stuck to it. The whole community, from postman to principal, just

nodded non-committal when we speculated. And the doubt, the play-along, was a subtext we slowly learned to read in their eyes. She got to you—didn’t she? we’d think. Most of us only knew that dads were even a thing because of television. You could sense a mother tense each time one walked on screen. They’d squint, scrunching their face at the question they saw coming in the distance. Where? Why? I got TV so crossed with my own channel that for years they fused: dad was a poorly cropped photo of a saddle-shoed stranger sitting on the hood of an old Chevy with a Wyoming license plate. Years later, when I tried to chase the memory down, the picture disintegrated, the car and shoes too old. I called my mom, panicked. Mermaids movie, she said, I’m sure of it, cause for a whole year you were runnin’ around saying you felt like Winona—I thought you were trying to tell me something else

entirely. Each answer, more questions.

Our fatherless tribe only grew as teenagers; like magnets, our lostness was

polarizing. Attract/repel. Willie’s dad was homeless, lived somewhere off Garden Grove Boulevard. We’d occasionally hear word of a sighting, but he was unfindable. The first Chris I ever knew had a gone dad and his mom spent every night at the bar looking for him. Mikey’s dad split on a Harley and his mom planted garrison-like at the windowsill afraid he’d return. Zaire’s dad was neverthere, like mine, but he had a framed picture of Tupac above the TV in the living room and convinced us Pac was his uncle, a fame so great that nobody even worried about his dad anymore. James’ dad was gone too, I forget why, but because he was mixed with light eyes, like me, we convinced everyone we were cousins, even though we were mixed with two different things entirely. If you weren’t nuclear, you needed a narrative, we discovered, and ours was a composite family of discarded parts.

I’d stopped believing dads even existed until I met one. Chris3’s dad. (Six out of eight Chris’ were dad-less, according to club statisticians.) I moved to a new city and made friends with what I now know was the middleclass, but felt rich then, and he let me come over for snacks. The apparition was in the kitchen.

He asked us about our day, what we were up to. I must have made him uncomfortable because I just stared at him, flummoxed, like a museum exhibit, a brontosaurus bone or a moon rock, circling the kitchen island while he prepared dinner. You’d think it was the novelty of seeing something new that transfixed me so, but I’d never seen a kitchen island before either. I think it was the incongruity of the mythical figure doing a daily task. His knife gleamed in the light as he chopped. Either the ordinary was heroic or the other way around. Years later, I was in Puerto Rico to be the best man at Chris3’s wedding, when it came out that his dad had warned him that day: watch out—that kid’s trouble, a fatherly instinct, perhaps, for sniffing-out creatures who’d only ever lived unbridled.

I eventually learned that the missing dads were abducted after all, just not how we thought. Most had suffered chemically after standing too long downwind of their own fathers, breathed toxicity in whole. In some, this caused poisonous buildup of the protein tau, prompting selective forgetfulness. In others, fatherhood caused a migraine so severe they developed retinal artery occlusion, a partial blindness such that they couldn’t see a child’s shape. Other’s developed hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and their hearts thickened, hardened in the places where they should have felt us. Some developed Men-ears disease, a vertigo-inducing hearing loss that blocked out the frequency of children’s cries. None of this solved the burning hole through the middle of us, but you could decoupage the wound.

Some of us are dads ourselves now, purposefully writing a new story or accidentally rewriting the old one. We, too, invent men in a vague before. We’re terrible at it, mainly, but we stay, Winona or not, largely waiting to be congratulated for doing so. Sometimes though, when I’m deep in work, and my sons next to me talking, I can’t hear him. Or when he cries, I might reflexively respond walk it off, and feel my heart crust over. I have to flinch it away before it overwhelms me.

I get nervous now when I see a group of kids congregate. What could they have to talk about? We stayed, didn’t we? I watch them scurry into commandeered places, but their chatter stops when I approach.

Cagibi - 2021 Print Issue

Between us, S held the record for smuggling: a handle of vodka, a bottle of scotch, and two of wine, divided into one-liter pouches taped around the ankles, stomach, and stuffed in a sports bra. She said it was the only time she found small breasts to be a blessing, though I still never knew how to take it when she joked about her body. My record was less, but body jokes were about the same.

After two late-December weeks spent between Moscow and St. Petersburg, we had begun to prepare for our departure back to Kuwait the following morning. As Americans living in a dry country, our final vacation hours often took on a frenetic, gluttonous pace. Beers. Bacon. Unedited movies. We hopped in the elevator in search of what would soon be contraband.

Outside of the Leningradskaya, one of Moscow’s Seven Sisters, I asked the Bellman to point me to the closest liquor store, with my hand in the international shape of a cup, bringing it to my lips several times. He looked perplexed. Misread, I thought, the action might too closely resemble the sign for blowjob.

“Vodka, vodka” I said, pointing outward to the city, a longer, more conspicuous “O” than I’m used to as an attempt to sound local.

“You know you look like a crazy person, right?” S said behind me.

“Hop in anytime, honey.” I replied, and she laughed at my tacit acknowledgment that she was right.

He pointed us toward what appeared to be a deserted bridge, mimed that we should pass beneath it to the other side. It looked abandoned, desolate, with no signs of anything beyond but more of the same. Still, where normal people might have turned away, our need was dire: she, an elementary school teacher, I, a journalist, regional stressors to our jobs had caused our alcohol quotient had grown similar. For me, the pruno wine and pot-stilled liquor ubiquitous on our Western Expat-filled compound had given me a terrible case of rotgut and I wasn’t sure my colon could survive another batch.

We nodded our heads in agreement and poured our way down Kalenchevskaya Street, huddling against each other for warmth, exhaust fumes assaulting our already frozen noses. Sarah was bundled up so high on the neck, I could only trust that she was in there, her long blonde hair sticking out the back of her beanie, a waving flag of pseudo-confirmation.

Halfway through the tunnel, we began to see that we were indeed sent in the right direction. A train station was in the near distance, a bank, some shopping ahead. We passed a government looking building with guys, seemingly drunk, hanging out outside. They appeared to be neither homeless nor going anywhere; it was a strange time to be loitering given the below freezing temperatures.

As we approached a busy intersection we noticed a small neon sign with two clanking bottles pointed underground, beneath which sat an ambulance, parked on the sidewalk, nearly blocking access. A crowd was forming and watching something unfold intently. I wormed my way between the bundled and huddled crowd, with S’s hand now pulled close to my back protectively, as we made our way through and descended the steps.

Two paramedics walked upstairs, carrying a man with a baseball-sized welt on his forehead, well-bloodied. His mouth hung open, moist with spittle. I thought I heard the guttural sound of throat singing. We looked and tried not to, simultaneously, while still descending into what could only be described as a haze that you could feel but not see. We entered the store to an entire aisles-worth, of bottles broken on the floor, the wreckage wet, smeared, and smelling of the pungency of alcohols that shouldn’t mix.

There is a palpable fog in spaces where a large and public trauma has just happened, where a post-rage vacuum sucks out the breathable air like a collective gasp, the off-putting strangeness of a group ignoring. The store was holiday-packed: every cashier’s lane five people deep, nobody acknowledging the disaster at the door, or the two guys who seemed responsible for it all, still inside, drunk and combative, wandering the aisles. Mostly, they could be avoided, until we found ourselves, finally, waiting to check out. S gasped, noticing my grip on a bottle of wine changed from cradling its midsection upright, to choking its neck from above, held low like a newly sprouted appendage.

S was pregnant at the time, though we didn’t know it yet.

And, a few weeks later, back in the gulf, during Arab spring, where regional tensions flared, and the rhetoric of U.S. politicians increasingly left us feeling exposed in the souks, it became increasingly less important for me to throw caution to the wind for the adventure. I thought about timing. Of hits and misses. The timing of when we walked into that store, of a child conceived. Truthfully nothing happened that night—to us anyways. Truth is, I didn’t even think about it again until the next time I watched baseball.

Published @ Wanderlust

The trick is to apply just enough rouge to contour the cheekbones — then double it. You can’t be subtle, or the lighting will wash them out. It pains me to imagine them, painted up clownlike against the dulled hues of dirt for eternity, but artist discretion isn’t really a term our industry uses. I nudge the woman’s face, first to the left, then right, carefully.

“Whoever said that a person can be whatever they want when they grow up was selling something.”

I reach into my kit for lipstick and a hairbrush, whichever I find first. Fuchsia. Liquid gloss. As requested. I try not to judge the color.

Leaning in, hand to mouth, I whisper: “Just between us girls — I’d have gone darker, hon.”

She stays perfectly still.

“It’s not that they don’t mean it, mind you, just that they mean something patronizing when they say you can be an explorer, or on TV, or something. Sure: Wander outside. Buy a camcorder, even. You’re still not Magellan or Seinfeld — case closed.”

Other than the two of us, the building is empty; the room, windowless. I prefer to work alone through the night. It’s a small family business, so as long as I get the job done by morning, Father’s happy. Tonight, however, I’m running late. Hurrying.

“Nobody tells you that for most people, even if you do the thing you set out to do, the version of the dream you achieve is so compromised, it might as well be something else entirely.”

I don’t talk to dead people expecting a response; I do it because when I go to work, that’s who’s there. Curse of the night shift.

The requests range from the mundane to the bizarre: paint the toenails a funny color, embalm the body with perfume, formaldehyde-engorge the anatomy, bury a man with his mistress’ dress without the wife knowing. Some ask for particular facial expressions, like perky or satisfied. I’m working on smug, but it’s not in the bag yet. As the last one to see the body, it’s my job to make sure any next-of-kin requests are covered. I had a guy once who wanted to be presented on his side, propped up, head resting on his hand, sunglasses on — permanent vacation style. We did it, too.

Growing up in a mortuary family, I’ve seen it all. The trade passes down — even embalming, which you’re not supposed to do yourself anymore on account of the cancer. And since I’m the only one who went to cosmetology school — none of us has any formal desairology training — I get all the hard cases: the sloshers, the leathers, edemas, some burns. Strictly closed-casket work someone’s hoping I can zhuzh. My dad walks in as I’m finishing up.

“Sheesh, turn some lights on. It’s spooky in here.”

I look up over my glasses but don’t respond.

“You almost finished?” he asks, willfully avoiding the body with his eyes. “And put a dress on her, firchrissakes.”

“I need the tableau, Dad. We’ve talked about this. I’m liable to make her Neapolitan if I can’t see her as a whole.”

“Fine,” he says. “You staying for the funeral? See how your work goes over?” My dad’s always been a big guy, but in small spaces, his body seems even more so. He’s a teddy bear, if a little over-stuffed.

“You know I can’t, Pops. I’ve got to be at the salon by ten.”

He gives his normal disapproving look. “Salon. Please. Don’t start. I don’t know why you waste your time in that temple of self-involvement. It’s a losing battle. You could be here, doing serious work.”

Whatever my half of this conversation is, it finishes without me.

I walk out some time near sunrise, as usual. Just enough time to get home and sleep for a few hours before heading to the salon. I love making people pretty — but I really thought I’d be further along, stylist to the stars or something. My dad’s consternation still in my ear, I consider briefly if it’s better to make ugly people pretty, or pretty people ugly, and how both are a matter of highlighting.

Afew hours later, I’m three customers into the day: “The hair is particularly problematic, if you want to know the truth. The way it keeps growing after you die and all. If you’re cutting a fade, for example, you’ve got to go tighter than you think. The nails, too: do them too soon and you get a reverse French Tip situation.”

It’s clear, by my customer Shanna’s face, that this was one of those anecdotes that died halfway through the telling.

“Wow. That’s . . . something.”

The new girl the next chair over chimes in. “That growing after death stuff is bullshit. My dad’s a cop and says so.” The crowded workplace makes me long for the empty of the night job.

“Well, does your dad spend every night elbow deep in — ?”

Before I can finish, my boss Brent walks over and leaves a note at my station without making eye contact.

See me after.

I finish up with Shanna and head to Brent’s office, where another stylist is perched on his lap, laughing. He quickly shoos her up and out. She clacks to the door in coyish tiny steps and closes it behind her.

Brent stares at me, wide-eyed, the eyeballs an exclamation point stressing how over the repeated conversation he is. I consider how often the eyes get credit for what is really the work of the muscles around them. “You simply have to stop talking to the customers about death. Nobody wants to hear about your undertaker bullshit.”

I imagine the left eyeball falling out, then he’d need my help.

“You know I hate that term,” I say.

“Fine, mortician. Whatever. People don’t want to know that the hands touching them have been groping dead people all night.”

Itused to be that I spent most of my time at the salon and only helped the family out on weekends or when a serious unviewable came in; lately, the ratio has slid the other direction. I head back to the mortuary around eleven for my third double-shift this week. A dead child: eight years old. Children are tough. The trocar should be used with a light hand, yet the cavities and organs must puncture and drain all the same. The makeup should appear as no makeup at all.

“Funny you should ask, sweetie,” I say, turning the girl onto her back to tie in a weave of long, blond ringlets. “This funeral prep stuff is just like a day at the salon. A good stylist leaves everybody wanting to look at you. You feel radiant, so you are radiant.”

I grab the clothes from the suitcase the family sent in with her. She must have been cared for — it’s monogrammed. Their belongings arrive in Louis Vuitton trunks and plastic trash bags alike, sometimes dictated by circumstance, sometimes seemingly used to make a point. I close the case, running my fingers across the indentation of its golden lettering. I roll her gently back and forth to pull her clothes into place.

“A freshening-up here does the same. Done poorly it looks fake — like glazed plastic fruit. The skin is too waxy, and people can’t look at you very long at all, even if they can’t place why. But when you do it well, people stare. They wonder if the you is still you, if maybe you’re still in there somewhere.”

I step outside to find Dad whistling as he unloads stuff from his car. An early morning gray gives way to a yellowish hue behind him.

“How’d we do last night?”

“Normal, Dad.”

Brent tells me he’s squeezed in a last-minute appointment for me with Victoria. I used to cut her husband’s hair. He was nice. Increasingly, I get her instead. She’s often giddy in a way that feels disingenuous, tragic even, some heavier thing at work.

“Can you keep a secret?” she asks.

I’ve never thought about it, actually, but I keep them all the time. She shifts her body toward me in the chair.

“I have a date — not with my husband.” The last part isn’t spoken so much as conspicuously mouthed, with a hand up for privacy. She’s booked a blowout, but now she wants more. She mentions a need to be, in her words, high-school hot. I think: Fuchsia. Liquid. Gloss.

I lose myself in the process, largely considering my own complicity in her plans. Perhaps her husband isn’t nice at all. I keep applying, well beyond need. Or maybe he’s too nice — one of those doormat types. I tease her hair to the ceiling. I highlight the face, then double it. Maybe this guy she’s going out with is even his friend. I apply makeup from the clavicle down, to make her breasts more pronounced. She may have objected, but I tuned her out. By the time I finish, she’s crying. I can’t be sure for how long.

Brent fired me on the spot.

Afew days later, I get another one: bullet hole in the head. The hole gapes. About twenty minutes in, I realize I know the guy from high school and recall having been unkind to him. The memory of my own shallowness stings, even if only I see it. I walk around the table a few times in order to reassess the full scope of the wound. I squeeze his hand once as if to say I’m sorry. The skin flaps are mostly there, but half the skull is gone. I’m shamefully excited that his is a restorative job, like showing extra care now might make up for how I’d treated him.

I walk to a back room and grab various supplies that I don’t often use. I’m small-talking out loud to him about family and work wondering if my voice is doing that trailing off thing it does in movies when the person’s making tea in the other room or something. I walk back into the room with the supplies to find him lying there patiently. Waiting.

“It may not matter much to you now, but I did always like you.”

I pause for the space of the answer I think he’d give.

“Yes, really! I was just self-involved. My head was elsewhere. You know I always had plans to get out of this place — guess you beat me to it.”

The lights buzz.

“I guess what I’m saying is sorry. If I wasn’t so concerned with getting somewhere else, I might have enjoyed what’s nice about being right here, you included.”

Using pieces of plastic and denture adhesive, I carefully reform a forehead; mortician’s wax — liberally — for the rest. I absolve myself of my high school transgressions with a care that takes far too long, and finally dress him with only a few minutes to spare. We’ve talked through the night. Me speaking my piece, imagining his.

By mid-morning, the hall is packed. The whole family runs around putting the finishing touches on the building. Dad even calls in a couple of cousins we only use for the larger crowds. When the funeral starts, I sneak into the back. It’s standing-room only, plus a hundred or so outside. The signage bills it as a joy-of-life situation, a revisionist history already underway. I bristle, unsure if the family is being fashionable or just made the decision to refer to it as such before he died in the manner he did.

After, people begin the procession, passing the casket one by one, looking in, stopping. It turns my stomach at first, but I calm when I see prolonged stares. As the spouse approaches, the cumulative grief-hum of the room hushes, waiting. She throws herself on the body, half inside the casket, kissing him. She has to be pulled off by family members.

Nailed it.

I excuse myself, unseen, through a rear door, eager to find the day’s arrivals.

Published @ The Coil

custody : A protective care, but often neither.[1]

[1] The visitors arrive disheveled. The visitors remind each other the rules in the parking lot. The brother tells the brother no duh because as visitors, they’re on edge no matter how many times they’ve come. The sister fixes the front of a dress she’d normally not wear. Other visitors will be sent home. Several are newbies that think they’re guests. One visitor brought a newborn and doesn’t like how the guards check the diaper bag. Others look better her than me when they ask to search her person in another room. Some will be sent away because their inmate is not taking guests today. The younger brother visitor considers how that makes the prisoners sound like royalty, and how both are positions of status often conferred at birth.

The clocks wind or unwind depending on where you stand. The guards screen until a clipboard convinces them they’ve done their job. The guards are concerned that the term guard is too passive. Corrections officer, then, is a blanket. The corrections officer will not open one door until the previous door is closed. For these moments, which happen several times per visit, visitors are prisoners of process.

The prisoner will stand on the line. The prisoner will wait for the door. The prisoner won’t touch the visitor. The prisoner must show his hands in the photo or the photo can’t be taken. The photographer is a prisoner with special privileges. The prisoner cannot have a copy for himself, or depending which prison we’re at now, can be given the photo at a later date. The visitor struggles to keep track. The officers keep track of struggles. The visitor must not be late but cannot be early because they keep the doors locked around here. The visitors must possess no paraphernalia, which bans some colors but all logos; little brother kisses goodbye Raiders jerseys, god’s love and appeals to logic.

The guests are kids here to see their father. The father is a step-father, but it didn’t seem to matter ‘til now. The inmate asks about your mother because inmate is a temporary rooming situation. The mother doesn’t know you are still coming for visits. The visitors will carry no items with them except change for the vending machine. That is too much change for the vending machine. The visitor will not have an attitude about it. The prisoner will watch his mouth. The prisoner will watch his step. Watch this.

The visiting group will not speak to another group. The families will not embrace. If the corrections officer has to tell you again the prisoner will lose privileges. The inmates who are grown men will stop looking at your sister. The corrections officers who are also grown men will please stop looking at your sister. The inmates have five minutes. The convicts have all day, the latter a pejorative hurled at someone who’s not going anywhere. The inmate is twitchy. The inmate is not who you remember he was within these walls. The inmate can’t control you from here and maybe you can make a relationship out of that. The inmate’s sure of it. A stepson has his doubts. The convict’s lawyer has a plan of appeal. The convict’s friends who testified will complicate the plan. The inmate is the only guilty man he knows. The prison is far.

The visitors are tired. The prison is at the border on purpose. The visitors had to leave before dawn to be there on time but not early. The ex-visitors still have a long drive home. The kids are pulled over out front where the local police sit in wait for anyone visiting the convicts. The cop who is a grown man eyes the little sister in a way that nearly gets the older brother pulled out of the car. The brother should watch his mouth. Watch this: the system’s an ocean. A case is a wave that crashes on the prison floor, the undertow just overture. We wade in its waters, awaiting recede. Sporadic dispatches from a sailor at sea come collect, if you’d like to accept press three.

Abuelitas are the worst. Tiny, embarrassed-for-you bodies of belonging, who clearly see your inchoate chameleon, liquor you at the corner store between the sunflower seeds and the saladitos, harangue you with their aggressive hands and mother’s-mother gaze, interrogating your eye color, if-this-why-that-ing the skin juxtaposition, sensing deep your unrooted mezcla already.

Pobrecito, they say, confirming you don’t understand, pinch your arm and slap your cheek in loving frustration through the crowded aisles and over-burdened shelves of the local while you mutter no hablo, or worse, poquito what you should have poco’d though it takes years to know the little difference of little while they laugh their knowing laughs of your learned ignorance.

Dios mio their old grey hair rages at your lost culture, begrudges you because you are their own children’s willful decision to forget, to tuck heritage tightly in husks and holiday packaging, some masa nacimiento nativity candles smoothing over the bumps of difference with that slickened glide of assimilation and god forbid they ask you your name that waves the white flag of erasure, easing your entrance in some rooms prior to arrival but in others, a billboard for all the things they should never have allowed in generation-slow, glacial acquiescence.

Payaso, the abuela chorus sings as it always does while you giggle and humble-weasel out of her tight grip in your practiced performance of don’t-care-you’ve-been-called-that-so-much and awkward backwards shuffle out the mercado and when your best friend, whose parents wouldn’t let you in the house last week for being too brown, asks you what’s that lady going on about or do you know her you just say dunno and hold it somewhere small and deep.

Originally published @ Pidgeonholes (Excerpt from A Dictionary of Modern Consternation)

In the endoskeleton is a memory like rings on a tree should you split us, an engraving of accumulated happenings. Traumas, of course, the broken bone chorus from head-to-toe; but also, what it feels like to run. To. From. Free. You are right, joy, to say I don’t sing you like I should, but I’m trying. All the points where minimal cartilage increases friction, the vibrating record of flights taking off, the jostle of rollercoasters, and the abrupt thud of falling from trees that previously cradled us. That car crash hides in us too, as does the other and the one yet to happen. Your pockmarked and divoted femur, the screws throughout, too few it seems, speaks volumes. Echoes. Reverberates. I read recently of an Oregonian woman who, after death at 99, was autopsied to find that all of her internal organs—except her heart—were in the wrong place. Situs Inversus, where everything is a mirror image. She died not knowing how justified she was to feel that something inside was wrong, inverted, backwards, confused. But we know, body, don’t we? This is my not cracking a joke about where her heart was.

Published @ Heartwood Literary Review

Bedtime is a ritual

I didn’t wholly know

could split you, but

daddy, he says, what about my water,

but daddy, my story, you forgot my face

wandering fingers smell

of citrus he’d been picking

at scabs, wants to know what time

is it, where our dead dog went,

why there are no men in our family

shh I say, you have to count and

count on them showing eventually

the sheep I mean

that magic lies

in the steady hum of repetition

Published @ Iron Horse Literary Review

It’s afternoon, a late California summer, and the sun is pouring over the metal of our family lemon, a lime green Mustang, such that the waves of steam off the tin-can top can nearly be grasped. Inside, the dashboard, too, radiates.

I stand in the middle of the front bench seat, the sweaty skin of my bare back repeatedly sealed and peeled from the vinyl, flanked by my older cousins, thirteen and eleven. We barrel past hundreds of carports, over the molten blacktop alley of our oversized apartment complex.

My barely older brother is in the back with his nose smudged against the smaller rear passenger window, bouncing up and down each time we hit a speed bump, but I am jumping too much to notice. Laughing. And as the car approaches the walkway between buildings nearest our apartment, the girls glimpse my mother, standing in a rose-covered white hippy dress, unexpectedly home from work, where I always recall her. She grimaces in the car’s direction as it approaches her cross-armed stance.

In panic, the girls release out a long and slow but audible Shit!, lowering their heads in attempt to reverse what has already been seen. The car passes at twenty miles per hour, seemingly with no driver, just my bouncing ecstatic face, up and down, and up with hands waving, hair lost in the drooping yellow headliner, and my brother’s squished nose against the glass as he wide-eyed recognizes her, and turns to wave through the rear window as we pass.