God, if there's anything entering this piece, let it be a breeze not another flood. No one gives news about a war without splashing blood on faces, without digging a hollow, without an arrow or a sword inside hearts. Tell me the best way to sing a dirge. Or the best way to pronounce someone's death. There is nothing like he died while sleeping, emptiness had already filled the body, and a well is already dug inside the relatives. Everyday, we count dead ones like grains—if it is not an …
My teen is learning another language. Nouns only get him so far. Round verbs clash with square pronouns. Roles befuddle fluency. We joke, we sing. Mom (loud) and kid (embarrassed). We pick up cuss words, gingerly, like dropped fruit (bruised but still good). Months of drudgery, then he drafts paragraphs about a family tree, and the apple does not fall all that far from the trunk. *** I quit shaving my legs when the kids were little. It just happened, slowly, during blustery seasons …
All the way from poppy seed to jackfruit, we are told to measure each week, each stumble and kick. From produce to blood levels we weigh chances the way we weigh ourselves, breath held, fear crawling up our naked skin. We don’t budget for peaches and avocado; grapefruit and corn. We don’t expect time to lapse with soap scrubs reaching beyond the elbow, under nail beds scrubbing our lifelines down to broken. The smell of unsullied skin, how it lingers, sticks fast to the nose, …
It is believed that Sushruta, the ancient Indian physician, first used spherical balls of sesame seeds as an antiseptic to treat his patients. From there, laddoos gradually began taking shape as the sweet we’ve come to know and love today. Besides being dragged into comparison with apples to point out glaring incongruencies, oranges can have other uses too— like Vitamin C, like juice at breakfast, like the piquant taste of something nostalgic, like a prop to show how a …
With the invisibility they gave as if I had no body, only soul wavering up or down stairs, I stole. From my stepmother's alligator patterned wallet removed bills. Or was there never such thing as unquenchable spirit & no angels singing above the 7-11 as I whispered across its fluorescent lit tiles? Just miles of nerves & trillions of cells churning conversions of glucose & O2 to energy in time to the slurpee machine's stirred vats of uranium green, lava …
I am the baloney in the sweet woman sandwich flanked by my angel food mother and daughter known for their honey sauces their endless supply of surrender to the greater good they both may say I am a sweetbread too, but I know I am only minced up organ meat that comes from throat and brain the one that sometimes feels the need to shout out savory bitter truths in hope that real can also be revered and share a place on our inviting earthenware plate Susan Shea is a …