FEATURED
august, nineteen-forty-seven
your mother tells you to drench yourself in every piece of clothing you own and you do not want
to be a jungli so you wrap your torso in kurtas and salwar kameezes and layer your long legs in
tight churidars and you want to bring your ghagras but they are too heavy to run in so you leave
Phoebe’s Tooth
Phoebe, having finished her stockings, started on her husband’s shirts and then, with Rose, tackled the vegetable garden while Rose told her stories about her brother’s exploits at Salamanca, which sounded like a lark, at least in her telling. Phoebe held the wholly unfounded belief that she might have made a good soldier, which she voiced as she pulled a doll-sized radish out of the earth and shook it firmly. Laughing, Rose shielded herself from the spray of dirt.
Confessions
wǒmen—or to say—we
are waiting by the sea, & i watch
my mother confess to receding
shorelines. there is only plurality
in her stories, only wǒmen, only
A Photograph Standing on a Wooden Bridge in Berlin 1945
How do you come back normal
from Deliverance Day
The New Pilgrims
Milo: …women so beautiful they don’t seem like they exist.
Father Rogers: It only seems that way because you’re young. (cigarette) Or actually—you’ll stop caring eventually. Time has a way of levelling it all out.
(speaking on Naya)
Milo: It’s the voice that goes before the laugh. I’m thinking of getting myself hypnotized because she’s still there completely if I have a dream or something. It’s not my fault, the impression, you know, the somatic thing…starts to fade. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s time…
Rogers: Leveling it all out, taking care of it all…
Milo: I don’t want that—like this. (beat)
The Lee She Loved
Marina woke to hushed conversations from the kitchen. Three voices, including Lee's, all low and serious.
Marina and Lee had lived apart now for six months, she and the girls here in Irving, Lee renting an apartment twenty minutes away in Dallas. He said he had good work there, though never offered specifics. Only on weekends did he stay with them. At first, the arrangement embarrassed her; they'd been married just two years. But she quickly came to appreciate the space it gave her from his increasingly frequent rants and demands.
Health and Safety
There have been plenty of times when I had to fight for my life.
Sometimes it was for my “health and safety”,
sometimes for happiness.
I fought for what I could not bear to lose,
but I lost all the same. I can still recall the taste of all
those defeats, as bitter as unripe plums.