In July, seven months to the day after her brother’s death, they arrive in Merzouga, Morocco, gateway to the dune sea of Erg Chebbi. The trip is meant to be a healing interlude, a brief escape; by immersing her in this place of exotic sights and sounds, he has hoped to give her a short respite from her grief.
I had this thought upon learning that my fifth-grade math teacher was applying to be the first teacher in space: The space shuttle will explode.
I didn’t know what to do with this thought because it was so confident and so future tense and so informative. But was it really information? I was an imaginative girl and what the adults would say I already knew. Every time my family flew, I quelled a cousin demon: The plane will crash. Foolish, anxious me, never in a plane crash. So I dismissed the worry and by January 28, 1986, had even forgotten it until my reading teacher was called to the office just past noon.
Clear enough to see you christen or condemn another
on the side of a beige building, I take the boat out
of the body that returns itself to me
The most beautiful clothes: iridescent black over Snarl Call. I wore the soft Sparrow
to the store, I borrowed the Crow to bag food;
the Chickadee to the masquerade; the Vulture to the show,
The neighborhood where I lived during my teenage years had a community swimming pool. It was small but clean: an aqua rectangle surrounded by pebbled cement, with a cobwebbed bathroom and a splintered picnic table, a rise of trees on one side of the wrought iron fence and a slope of grass on the other. […]
Addressing the morning I say
It was good of you to come
Dhruv found this faux French restaurant—a restaurant of sorts but perhaps more of a cafeteria—off the bypass road of a highway called Research Boulevard, close to his hotel. There were many of these restaurants all over the southern and midwestern states to which Dhruv traveled for work, and he had eaten in most of them. […]
1 The interior holds out its leathery hands. It wants to take me to California Where technicians will construct my head, And where the streetlights are broken yolks And small furry things crawl up my legs. 2 I decline the offer so the interior flips a switch Which makes my teeth cold as though I […]
I. Before the invention of glass, time was not translucent. Mostly it kept to itself, bandaging the wounded, sleeping inside the minerals that formed below our restlessness. Sometimes a volcano spit out a fugitive star—it cooled into obsidian, a window we could neither repair nor see through. But its arrows taught us the meaning of […]
Spell the name slowly before you come, as I have asked you to come, bearing me a sea-blue porcelain platter piled with what remains of what Maine was. As I said, the name can be that of anyone you wish never to see again, knowing if you did, your life, and happiness, were you to […]