What I call my good intentions get the best of me. / During week two of the semester I have students // place an asterisk each time shame shows up / in the excerpt of a memoir whose author’s take // on affirmative action & bilingualism I take for / internalized whitewashing.
I elegy. This bright morning unsayable / as the sentence of the woman who died / in daylight as her children climbed her still / body in a hospital bed.
My mother came to me last night. // Holding my youngest brother, / the ends of her body had disappeared.
Not even a year later, he and Kelvin had moved to San Francisco because he understood by then that he was not cut out to be part of a happy family either. Each month, Kelvin’s parents drove into the city to stay with them, and Phil wondered whether they knew that they were the reason for the move.
After my daughter’s birth in 2002, there were nights I sat in the rocking chair next to her crib, understanding that the world would be better if I killed myself. And her. I’d grip the arms of the chair and flex every muscle in my body to stop myself. One night, I walked into the room where her father was reading and sat on the edge of the bed beside him. I admitted I had no feelings—for him, for her, for myself—but that we could be friends; we could raise her together. We’d be fine. Our lives would be fine.
What whispers suckle, tugs / spines upright, name god. // Acolytes—mice sniffing / a wet breeze, blouse milk- // soaked at an infant’s cry, / universe ever expanding.
Oh cosmic through line,
teach the weaker sex your
bruising grip.
If the saints are to be believed, if this body is a dress / we slip into, out of, if each day and night is the mantle / we tie around our shoulders, fabric thin as the time it takes
I love you like my hands, which haul / the money in. Into our laps spill daughter / and son. We are drowning in wine and beer, / carrying each other across these rooms, / glasses filled above our brims.
“Something had changed,” writes Marilyn Abildskov in her essay “Scotty’s: A Brief History of Expatriate Time,” a memoir of her time teaching English in Japan. “Something inside me had changed—some boundary had been crossed or become irrevocably blurred, and I couldn’t put the old order back in place.” We often can’t resist trying to pinpoint […]
The girls mimicked his voice when he spoke, squeaking at him in high-pitched, nasal tones. They flicked things at him: not only chalk, but bits of spit-sodden paper, corn kernels, bobby pins, and flaky, greenish balls made of snot. Once, after he’d handed back a set of exercises, Roda Kudondo sauntered up to his desk and shoved her notebook in his face, mumbling in a slurred mishmash she intended as an imitation of his Texas drawl. The class exploded in laughter, and Aaron, not understanding, ordered her back to her seat.