I came down to Blues Alley tonight, where they serve things like steak and potatoes, and bread and butter. The menu is intentionally hearty, as if to tell us that this is the kind of relief a night here is supposed to provide. I’m not sure what it is I’m searching for relief from, but I did wake up this morning drenched in sweat, and with a sore chest to boot, as if a little gremlin had been out there overnight dancing from muscle fiber to muscle fiber while trying to rid me of a troubling …
Unmarked Car
Can I turn the canyon into a trampoline? I would say this is every writer’s quest, but Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf did not face an invisible amphitheater of internet editors. I envy my weird sisters of old, writing for joy and survival. They writhed with humid words. They were offered no shade from a masthead. They lacked the green visors of style guides. Out under the awning, they were driven to prophecy. Publication was a dandelion on a far continent. If their words …
Unwinding
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 …
The Great Mow
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 …
Growth Charts
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, …
Sweet Tooth
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 …