Is the day perfect  
if there are no birds to wake you  
but there is lemonade?  

or if you live on Lemonade Street  
but there are no birds on electric lines  
because the utilities are underground.  

no birds twittering in trees  
just the sweet sour taste  
of lemonade puckering your mouth  

the scent of bonnie braes in the air,  
standing still in a pitcher of ice water,  
tangy, acidy,  
still sweeter than most.  

My neighbor,  
who is always preening and  
chatting up the neighbors,  
makes hers with bubble gum bursts and *****,  
a lemon drop of punch drunk love.  

If I want birds and trees  
I just walk across the street  
to the older neighborhood with telephone poles—  
some line birds,  
but mostly garden gnomes and bird baths.  

My dog delights in yanking me there,  
scattering the conferences  
of cardinals and jays in mid song  
from worm feast  
to the trees.  

Here, old men and women  
in shorts and summer dresses,  
holding citron nectar  
in tall glasses with seeds, rind and pulp,  
delight in their perfect day  
filled with lemonade and birds.  

I don’t know anymore  
if they are thrilled with the trill  
or fed up with the cacophony  
of untuned bird calls,  
birds in all the trees where they belong,  
silent at night.  

Deep in the forest  
filled with leaves,  
I suppose their diamond-throated song  
is a mournful dirge  
for when a tree falls  
silently, deadly in the green.  

One day our small community saplings  
will bloom,  
and the days will be filled  
with the miracle of birdsong  
and drinking lemonade  
on Lemonade Street.

Orpheus Listens to the Requiem of His Own Undoing  
                (after Leonard Kress)


Orpheus hears his songs played on broken strings,  
A dirge plucked soft by an old man with blight.  
He laughs at this fiasco, cringes as it rings,  
Echoes bending, whispering through trees at night.  

Behind him, nova bass lines swell and roll.  
He imagines the dancers weaving in a line,  
The wading birds now gone—silent in their toll,  
Their scattered iambs left to beachgoers’ time.  

He turns back—loses his time, theirs too.  
He pleads; time will not rewind for beggars.  
He cries; sorrow will not soften, nor undo.  
He sets his vision on a new career—foreteller.  

He fixes his fate, throwing his guitar,  
Its keys, its chords—all song surrendered to riptide’s pulse.

Answers to the questions you always wanted to ask the departed:
(A counter poem with answers after Ellen Bass Inquest)https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/inquest-ellen-bass-poem

She loved apricots, not figs.  
Olives reminded her of saltwater,  
and the yellow irises—those were never hers.  

Her feet stayed clean because she refused to walk barefoot,  
never trusted the ground, never trusted much at all.  

She did not cut her hair  
because she liked the weight of it,  
the way it draped across her shoulders  
like something constant.  

The married man was nothing—  
just a name she could never forget.  

She was terrible in the kitchen  
because she never measured,  
because she thought heat would shape things just fine.  

The chickens shat everywhere  
because she let them,  
because she found humor in their mess.  

The fog over the bridge,  
she watched it,  
but never spoke about it,  
never pointed, never sighed.  

She never trusted anyone fully.  
She won raffles because fortune liked her better than she liked herself.  

She sang the same lullaby her mother sang to her—  
a tune no one quite remembers.  

On the floor, waiting,  
she thought about nothing.  
That was the thing she was best at.  

She could never give up kisses,  
never told where she found the chanterelles.  

She left too much behind  
and too little at the same time.

I Should Have Followed You  

"Can I still call you Dorothea?"—even though the black and white lines in the paper reduce you to the habit you wore, arrange you into silence, a name and surname surrendered to the cloistering of lilies. Somewhere beyond this obituary, the grown children you once taught trace grief into their office desks, their minds recalling your half-remembered lessons. The others—those who once marched beside you—remember the compadre who chose devotion over struggle, who vanished into the ghost dust of old revolutionary dreams.  

Once, you were a believer who marched along Che and Fidel, a woman with a true north compass. You were never reckless, never a ghost in Havana’s dusk. You spent your nights writing, sealing letters to revolutionaries. You drank in hope like sugarcane.  

Then, the cause hardened. The slogans lost their breath. When Fidel called the people gusanos (worms) in a moment of drunkenness, you knew you must leave the revolution and Cuba behind. It was a certainty.  

You rooted yourself among the Miami exiles. We met on campus, arguing over a political opinion piece you wrote for the college newspaper. I argued that the Bay of Pigs operation was necessary. You wrote that it was a stupid exercise in democratic colonialism and was doomed to failure. And it was.  

Our love was a bickering affair. My adolescent jokes, mocking what I thought were your misplaced beliefs, chipped our foundation. I believed I was never lost. But I was orbiting a center I refused to name. After the revolution betrayed your faith, you retreated into a steady, quieter certainty—Jesus. He told you to press your palms into the smallest child’s hands. "Teach them lessons in your authentic voice," the command.  

I should have followed you. I could have stepped over the doubt that swelled between us, made a church of our mornings, sheltered in your certainty—if only you laughed more. If only I’d prayed less in jest.  

Now, my fig grows stubborn at my window, its roots strong, its love silent, and I, too, am nearing the end. I would light a candle, Dorothea—but what god still takes offerings from men like me? I will leave a hundred dollars in the box instead, fold your name into my palm, and call this devotion.

Sharp as an edge that does not ask what it is cutting.  
whole as a thing that does not need proof to exist,
thought arrives in full motion before meaning—
color before shape, light before weight,
not as process, not as method,
but truth already formed, unwilling to be held,
which needs no tending, refining,    

It is not a single stroke, a mark left in color.  
It is a corridor of light bending toward a vanishing point,  
a figure suspended in the breath between surrender and flight,  
a mouth parted—not in speech, but in revelation.  

It is an ocean poured into the shape of a body.  
It is a body without weight,  
held between the living and the remembered,  
flesh turned to pigment, pigment turned to memory.  

But thought is a language without translation.  
A thing seen without being rendered.  
It lives complete until the body interferes.  

Lift the brush.  
Already the destruction begins.  

The stroke was not supposed to be a stroke.  
It was supposed to be the collapse of sky.  
It was supposed to be the sound of a name  
spoken for the last time.  
It was supposed to mean something that words do not hold—

a woman made of light, moving without movement,
She is not illuminated by it, but shaped by the silence.  
She is made of it, pressed against its shifting edges,  
her figure stretching into the dusk behind her,  
her outline bleeding at the edges, the last smear of a dream.
a composition of gold and violet,  
her hands lifted not in greeting, but in knowing.  

Yet, what arrives is not what was imagined.  
It thickens where it should have unraveled,  
it bends where it should have stretched,  
it hesitates where it should have declared.  
the perfect thought impossible to render
that does not belong to canvas, to translation,  
the body’s limited means of making.

She moves too fast, escapes too easily,  
is undone in the visible, can not be held.
She will die in the weight of execution.

He will bury her, mourning and living
with the reality that her beauty
can only wholely be seen by him.

I was expecting giants—brushstrokes that shaped history, colors that conquered time. But the walls whispered absence, their icons carried elsewhere, lent to hands that bear their weight.  

Only the quiet ones remained, anchored in the still air, aching to be adopted, longing for eyes to grant them meaning, a gaze that wholly loves their frail existence, to be taken in—cradled, fed, held close to the heart, nourished within the soul’s ache.  

I wandered the museum aimlessly until the bright colors of the exile wing drew me in—a modest room, slightly bigger than a living room, yet dwarfed by the grandeur of the main galleries, the mélange of American and European masters—into the parlor reserved for Caribbean and Latin artists. The air felt lighter, without the weight of displacement that clung to the masters before them.  

And among them stood the most majestic surprise. Hanging proud, slightly left of center, was “Children at the Beach,” a painting by Roberto Moya— my Uncle Bob.

I stepped closer, my heart quickening as the memory sharpened. It was almost all I remembered it to be when it hung as my abuela’s centerpiece— two girls and a boy with sun-golden locks, digging in the sand, one watching the other two unearthing what they hoped to be priceless treasures—maybe an old Spanish coin, a clam with pearl, perhaps a hermit crab finding the perfect refuge. I inhaled as I noticed the salt air tangle their hair, the ocean stretching beyond them in loose, unhurried strokes. Their joy was unframed by fame,  and they were hung in this house by familiarity— and no less eternal.  
    
But here, in this museum, the painting felt different. It no longer carried the warmth of a centerpiece or the quiet reverence of a family relic. It was orphaned among the forgotten and overlooked.  
  
I traced the exhibit label with my eyes. It was indeed Bob’s work. “Robert Moya (1931 - 2008” was a Puerto Rican painter, printmaker, and digital artist. Born in New York, raised between two homes—an identity split, stretched across borders.”

The description continued, but the words rang hollow. “Moya’s hands found lines before words…” A stylized version of his history, carved into museum language, stripped of the details my abuela had once storied us with.  I knew the real version—the restless childhood, the copying of Sorolla and Sargent, the drift toward abstraction, the heavy pigments, the quick strokes that pressed emotion into the image. The Bob I knew was not a plaque but a presence, yet here he was, reduced to a fact.  

In the somber, reverent light of my widowed Abuela’s living room, “Children at the Beach” had always existed in pristine warmth, its colors vivid, its figures untouched by shadow. But here, in this near-forgotten wing of the museum, it lived under different conditions—without the flattering glow of swivel spotlights, illuminated only by the raw, harsh Kelvins of recessed bulbs. The light was unkind, exposing details I had never noticed before, forcing every imperfection and brushstroke into full view.  

And then I saw it—something I had never seen in all the years of looking. Beneath the blonde girl digging in the sand, a faint pentimento emerged, the painted-over outline of a dark-haired boy. Under the only boy, a barely perceptible shadow of black curls. For the standing girl, the same. The golden-haired children had not been golden-haired at all. Their brightness had been layered over—an artistic wig, a deliberate revision meant to disguise what had initially existed beneath.  

Standing before his work, I felt a quiet sadness settle inside me. Was this how legacy worked? Was this how remembrance became an institution—neatly cataloged, distanced, no longer held within a family’s hands?  

But seeing it here, in this room of exile, in the hum of low-lit bulbs and hushed footsteps, I felt the weight of history settle differently.  

The painting was a certainty at my abuela’s home—a familiar presence, a relic of joy. Here, it became something else, something unsettled, that carried the quiet ache of displacement.  

Bob’s work was remembered and preserved but not exalted or held in the giants' spaces. I wanted to ask if he had ever imagined this—his brushstrokes caught between belonging and exclusion, a legacy measured but never fully embraced.  

For the first time, I wondered if he had painted for permanence or for profit, if each line had been an answer to a question only he could hear.

2.  

The boy who was erased and replaced was my father, Frank Moya—an anesthesiologist, Bob’s only and older brother. Five years gone, Bob seventeen.  

Once, they had moved in tandem, twin orbiting bodies drawn by the same hunger. Frank chasing form, Bob breathing life into color. One tethered to certainty, the other lost to the sway of pigment, chasing something unnamed.  

Talent is not inherited like blood. Frank’s hands were stiff and precise, designed for incisions, not creation. His lens saw only the present, never the shimmer of what lay beneath.  

Then came the unraveling. Success stretched between them like unspooled thread, love thinning the cord.  

Elsi—my mother—had been the axis. Bob painted her into permanence, bound her to canvas. Frank made her his wife, held her in his arms, and called her his own. But art does not forgive time.  

Beauty is rarely lost at once—it fades in the margins, in quiet shifts too delicate to name until absence is undeniable.  

She softened. Weight settled where grace had once lived. Diabetes carved itself into her bones.  

And Frank stepped back, distanced himself in increments, shrinking his presence before severing it entirely. He left, remarried, and claimed a new life apart from hers.  

Bob married, too, and had two sons. One found words in music, the other in blueprints and brushstrokes, his hands preserving what his father left behind.  

Then Elsi died.  

And that was when Bob laid his last offering.  

The pentimento came in mourning—an attempt at reaching back, at rewriting what had been. The boy blurred beneath the sand—an artist’s revision, but also something gentler, something aching.  

Bob never spoke his intent. Maybe he hoped Frank would understand and see the tenderness in the act. Maybe he believed his absence could make space for something new.  

But timing is the cruelest editor.  

Frank saw offense, not mercy. Rejection hardened in his throat, brittle and immovable. To the world, he was generous. But bitterness is selective, and he keeps his guard for Bob.  

So the painting became Bob’s last attempt—his last hand-stretched across time. And when the olive branch crumbled, Bob let the boy fade—not erased, not forgotten, but veiled beneath layers of ochre and cerulean.  

Standing before the canvas, I felt the weight of what could have been—a reconciliation never written, a bridge never built.  

In Frank, I inherited certainty, a mind fixed in practicality. In Bob, I inherited words—how they curve and press emotion into the image. But I inherited neither the brush nor the eye—only the ache of wanting to shape something real.  

I was born with the artist’s sight, but not his hand. My fingers fumbled where Bob’s flew. My canvas was words, tethered to Bob’s color.  

Yet here, in the hush of forgotten halls, I learned the craft beyond creation—how patience carves meaning, how absence sharpens sight.  

How memory, like paint, is layered, concealed, revealed only when light shifts just so.  

Poetry, like pentimento, is a lesson in seeing—what was, what is, and what lingers beneath the brush.

Aftermath  

The crash happens, and then everything waits.

The tow truck arrives—sleek and gleaming,  
its midnight-black paint absorbing the streetlights  
in a perfect, polished hush.
It is not a wrecker—it is a machine with purpose,  
its curved chassis hugging the ground like a race car—  
the quiet arrogance of a predator.
The hydraulic arm unfolds with practiced precision,  
chrome glinting, not a speck of rust anywhere.

My car, foreign but familiar, hesitates in its wreckage.
A midsize sedan manufactured in a plant  
where workers assembled it with American hands,  
yet its heritage lingers in every curve,  
a design caught between old and new.
Its paint—a muted slate, unassuming—  
shows years of careful touch-ups,  
my own hands smoothing over time and dents itself.
Next to the tow truck, it looks misplaced,  
a junker entered as a joke for the Daytona 500.

The insurance company—AllFarmressive—  
calls twice, their scripted reassurances tumbling  
into contradictions.
"We’ll expedite your claim," they promise,  
but attach an additional note:  
"Due to unforeseen delays,  
processing times may be adjusted  
without prior notice."  
The website insists everything is  
"streamlined and efficient,"  
but each link loops back to the homepage.
Every representative sounds the same,  
pausing at the same beats,  
reading from a script that never quite  
answers the question asked.

The rental car resists.
The screen blinks erratically,  
menus nested inside menus,  
each button press yielding nonsense—  
"Safety Belts Huggings Allowed,"  
"Start Not Start? “  
I jab at the touch screen,  
scrolling through untranslated menus,  
attempting to override locked settings.
Each swipe resets the interface,  
bringing me back to the same blank screen,  
blinking in stubborn refusal.
It moves with a sluggish, uneven pull,  
dragging toward the right,  
forcing me to correct, over and over,  
a silent, insistent opposition.
It does not trust me.
It wants to remind me what happened.

The bumper stays on the sidewalk for three days.
A fractured artifact, curled at one edge,  
its metal warped—something half-melted, half-chewed.
Every dent tells a story,  
some shallow, some deep—  
one an open palm shape,  
another., the edge of a key.
The torn plastic lining exposes the layers beneath,  
each piece folding inward,  
a body returning to itself.
By day four, it is gone.

The streetlights flicker when I drive past.
The pavement hums under my tires,  
a restless, steady vibration.
Somewhere ahead, a distant car horn wails,  
too long, too sharp, disappearing into silence.
The shadows stretch unnaturally in the glow  
of a traffic signal that no longer changes.
Something has shifted.
Something is lingering.

I watch the headlights stretch ahead,  
the road tightens, then vanishes into silence

I know the crash is over,  
but I don’t think it’s done with me.

Between the Waves  

There was never a single border,  
only the shifting tide of language,  
guavas glowing in the heat,  
the churn of Spanglish rolling in  
before the tide could pull it back.

At the checkout line, the cashier asks,  
"Paper or plastic?"—so simple, so sharp.
I glance at Mama, but her words stick,  
caught between lips and hesitation.
I answer for us. The shame clings,  
her silence louder than any mistake.

Each summer, my abuela arrived  
with stories curled like conch shells,  
her voice full of salt and lineage,  
each word a bridge we crossed halfway,  
somewhere between knowing and forgetting.

She tells me of the women before us,  
how her mother boiled guava leaves  
to ease the aches of growing bones,  
how a girl’s silence could mean strength  
but never surrender. “You carry oceans,”  
she says, pressing a shell into my palm.
"Listen, and you will always know  
where you come from."  

In the humid dusk, I traced my name  
in sidewalk chalk, watched rain  
blur it into something new.
Could memory be pliant? Could belonging  
be washed and reshaped by the wind?

But what of the body—  
its slow turning, the way girlhood folds  
like an old dress, pressed into something new?
What of the hands that will cradle, will teach,  
will shape another name into the world?

I watch my mother’s weary eyes,  
the way she smooths the hem of her days,  
thumb and forefinger pressing the fabric,  
flattening something unseen.
I wonder if I will smooth my own worry  
the way she does—without pause,  
without breaking.

Outside, the cicadas rasp,  
their voices a low and constant hum,  
a pulse threading through the thick heat  
like something old, something knowing.

Here, the neon hum of the city never rests,  
palm fronds shudder against the skyline,  
the edge between past and present dissolving,  
Miami swallowing whole every homecoming,  
every goodbye never quite gone.

At the bodega, my friends are waiting,  
laughing too loud, pressing tamarind candy  
into my palm, the sticky sweetness clinging—  
a small amber stone, a promise of what remains.
We swap bracelets—plastic beads clinking—  
a quiet oath in neon-lit safety.

But between jokes, between  
sips of cola and smudged lip gloss,  
I catch glimpses—mothers’ tired hands,  
names that slip too easily from memory,  
the weight of futures we pretend not to see,  
just for now, just for tonight.

Still, the tamarind sticks,  
a sharpness beneath its sweetness,  
as if warning—this is not just candy,  
but proof of change, proof that  
what is soft can still pull,  
what is sweet can still sting.

As I walk home, salt on my lips,  
the moon folds itself into the bay,  
the water whispering,  
"Listen, listen,"
until it carries the answer away.

Somewhere, I smooth my sleeve,  
flattening the fabric beneath my palm.

Passing Through


The city recedes, and in the dim hush of the bookshop, she stands—  
a shadow among shelves, folded inward,  
something bent in her shoulders, a shape recognized but unacknowledged.  

Once, she had said nothing but told everything—  
the stagger in her step, the new weight in her limbs,  
the way she lingered at the edge of the studio light,  
no longer the form he had wanted to capture.  

He watches now, tracing absences—  
the ***** of her shoulders once held tension, a poise  
that suggested movement even in stillness.  
Now she carries herself differently,  
the lines of her frame settling rather than waiting,  
her presence less an idea, more a fact.  

Once, she was all gold-lit angles,  
the right lines, the hush of reflected glow—  
a frequent hire, the form desired,  
an artifact of someone else’s vision.  

She had belonged to the eye before she had belonged to herself—  
posed into being by hands that never touched her,  
rendered in strokes that softened what was sharp,  
every detail adjusted to fit a world not her own.  
She had been borrowed from that illusion,  
but had never been made to stay.  

But too often seen, too often known,  
a form rehearsed until it dulled,  
the lines that once shimmered with possibility  
grew fixed, predictable.  
No longer his vision, only a presence—  
no longer his invocation, only a fact.  

Now she moves with a tired grace,  
her skin softer, edges blurred,  
a body gone through motherhood, through ruin, life—  
the exact silhouette that he will never sketch again.  

She does not see him watching.  
She does not recognize the shadow he has become.  
She steps out through one door. He chooses another.  
Two figures, moving apart,  
the way a vision unspools,  
the way a muse disappears.  

He does not linger, does not reconsider—  
what was once luminous has dimmed,  
what was once rare is now merely seen.  
Yet what is art if not the wreckage and the salvage—  
the ruin and the radiance, the lifted and the fallen,  
the flawed, the irredeemable and the redeemed?  

He will not ask. He will not answer.  
And so, what he creates will never hold her.

After all the operations, after the slow unraveling,  
I trace the shimmer left behind,  
a pearl forming in the absence of what was—  
the weight of my steps lighter, not in grace,  
but in uncertainty mixed with hope.  

I do not run anymore  
Yet, I watch Tom Cruise sprint, sprint—  
limbs loose, effortless at sixty-two,  
vaulting over rooftops,  
clinging to the side of airplanes,  
breathing forever underwater.  

He crashes, bruises, bleeds in theory,  
but never in flesh—  
his smile intact, his hair untouched,  
a muscular chest absorbing each blow,  
with no marks,  
no limp, no hesitation.  
I content myself with the thought
that I am the real mission impossible,
the one facing the final dead reckoning.

Sure,  I sit here, reckoning with the
dead weight  of legs that will not vault,  
feet that drag instead of sprint,  
watching a man outrun time itself,  
as I count the losses my body cannot ignore.  

Neuropathy hums in my hands,  
a static whisper beneath the skin,  
feet waiting for signals that never arrive.  
Pouchitis returns, rhythmic,  
a ghost cycle that feels almost natural,  
a body remembering what it should forget.  

And yet—there is something else.  
Not just the loss, not just the ache,  
but the way illness made me listen,  
the way it softened the edges of my voice,  
the way it let me hold my wife’s hand  
with a reverence I never knew before.  

I see faces at the mall, at the movies—  
those moving without thought,  
and those like me, learning how to walk again.  
I see my brother’s quiet grief and joy,  
my own reflected back in his silence.  

To confront death is to speak to it,  
to name it,  
to let it sit beside you,  
to let it teach you how to be human.  

I am a better poet for this.  
Not for the suffering,  
but for the softness it left me.  

And somewhere within the nacre,  
within the slow layering of survival,  
I am still here.
of survival,  
I am still here.

Searching for Florecitas at the Supermercado

We walk, my brother and I, as the cool breath of night yields to the slow, sticky press of morning. Condado’s half-lit streets shimmer under retreating shadows, sidewalks smoothed by wealth, indifferent to our steps. Beach condos glow in the thinning dark, their balconies high as forgetting.  

Somewhere in this maze of Boricua pride of  polished storefronts, there is a supermercado. Somewhere beyond joggers in designer gear, behind terracotta houses older than the neighborhood’s ambition, is the candy our mother carried home. “florecitas”, sugar and memory pressed into a flowered shell.  

The hotel server had given simple directions—“izquierda, derecha, izquierda—left, right, left—and it would be there, waiting at the end of the street.” But in the air between us, the words blurred, my mind twisting Spanish into English. Derecha became left, izquierda became right, and the city rearranged itself under our misplaced steps.  

We moved forward, confident in error, passing high-fashion joggers and dogs bred for display. Past palm-lined streets, the world opened—not a supermercado, but the sea, stretching, oblivious.  

Tourist hotels framed us, their whitewashed facades reflecting the blank stares of wanderers who, like us, had no answers. We backtracked. Again, the city folded into the quiet wealth of Condado’s homes—white brick walls, gated walks—another dead end, another seawall holding back the morning tide.  

For a moment, we stood there, the heat thick now, pressing against us like the city was unwilling to yield. The ocean stretched wide, indifferent, erasing footprints before they could last. Condado did not welcome hesitation.  There was movement, commerce, and precision—but none for us.

I closed my eyes, searching for something in the lull between breath and heat. A memory surfaced—Morovis, my grandmother’s porch, the way the mountain mist rolled in at dusk, cooling the air before settling into silence, the scent of damp earth and slow conversation.

There, I would listen, swaying in my sun-faded hammock below, to my abuela chanting the rosary long after all her children had gone to sleep.  She was chanting in that squeaky rocker passed on to her like the house from her mother.  The rhythm was effortless as if she had always known how to move with the wind. In that place, Spanish was not a test, not an obstacle—it wrapped around me like something familiar, something inherited.  

But here, the air did not soften. The city did not cradle me like the mountains and old houses once had. The ocean did not care about misplaced words or lost directions.

We went back to the hotel, back to the start.

And there—was a man, his clothes worn by years, hair tangled in the wind, smoking a cigarette with the ease of someone who had lived too long to hurry. I asked for directions; my Spanish was frayed by childhood limits. He gestured—hands folding left, right, left—and I finally saw it. My mistake, my misplaced certainty.  

Knowing the way, even speaking the words correctly, didn’t make Condado mine. It never would.  

I let out a breath, the weight of it pressing into the thick, unmoving heat. The city had rearranged me, twisted the language in my mouth, and turned me inside out. Not by mistake—but by design.

Our walk deepens into the residential core of Condado, where the white brick houses stand uniform and impenetrable, their gates casting long shadows as the morning sun asserts itself. The sidewalks shrink with every block, narrowing from comfortable passage to tight corridors until finally, they are no more than thin strips of concrete—a gangplank hovering beside the street.  

We adjust our steps to fit the space, shoulders brushing against walls that do not give, the rough texture of aging plaster catching against my shirt. A gate swings open beside us, forcing me to step sideways. I press briefly against the wrought iron frame before slipping past, the cool metal leaving an imprint I can still feel as we continue forward.  

Here, the rhythm is different. The residents move alone, drifting toward the beach or peeling off toward the hotel district’s sleek restaurants. The streets bear Spanish names familiar yet distant, their syllables rolling off my tongue with a quiet recognition. They feel like names I should know deeply, but they sit on the edge of memory, just beyond reach.  

When we reach the supermercado, it is not the supermarket we see first—it is the high-rise tower looming above the parking lot, twenty stories of alternating terracotta hues, shifting from brown at its base to a soft gold at its peak. It is the only splash of color in this enclave, the only building that resists Condado’s strict homogeneity.  It stands like an Aztec temple without layers, the jutting balconies forming a jagged silhouette against the sky. It feels at odds with its surroundings yet completely absorbed into them, a contradiction standing quietly in place.

Then there is the supermercado itself, a sprawling gray box whose presence is neither defiant nor inviting but simply inevitable. There is no sign of charm, no gesture toward the past, just a square of necessity, unmoved by its location.  

We enter through the community side, the entrance facing away from the four-lane highway and its cold symmetry of traffic signals, away from the city's flow. This side of the supermarket is quieter and more resigned. The glass doors slide open, spilling out a rush of cool air, stopping our breath for a beat before we step through. The chill clings to our skin, but the heat lingers in our clothes, a presence that does not easily leave.  

Inside, the silence follows—a muffled quiet that absorbs the outside world, swallowing the hum of the street, the weight of the sun, the narrowing paths that brought us here.  

For a brief moment, I hesitate. The cold air presses against my skin, a sharp contrast to the warmth still clinging to my clothes. A shiver runs through me—not from the temperature, but from the sudden shift, the feeling of having stepped into something weightless and sterile.  Overhead, fluorescent lights buzz in a steady, electric rhythm, filling the space with a sound too mechanical to belong to anyone.  

Somewhere beyond the produce section, I hear Spanish murmuring between aisles—soft, familiar—but distant, threading through the air like something overheard rather than shared. A voice rises for a moment, just long enough to catch the shape of a phrase my mother used to say before it fades again into the hum of the supermarket.

I almost turn and reach it—but then it’s gone, swallowed by the fluorescent hum, leaving nothing behind. My fingers tighten around the edge of the shopping basket, the plastic pressing into my palm, grounding me in a place that still does not quite fit.

The supermarket is big and clean— almost too familiar, reminiscent of the Publix back home. Yet, despite the bright, polished aisles, there’s an odd sense of displacement. The products look the same, but the Spanish labels create just enough distance to remind me I’m somewhere else, somewhere I don’t quite belong.  

We wander the aisles. I scan the packaging, piecing together meaning as best I can— able to read more than I can speak or understand. My brother moves with ease, picking up local versions of pork rinds, sugar cookies, a guava drink.

The florecitas aren’t where I expect them to be, lost beyond my certainty. I ask a young woman who is stocking the produce aisle. She tilts her head, confused, then shrugs. She’s never heard of them. Maybe they go by another name.
She calls someone over her store intercom, her voice rising into the blank air of fluorescent light. A response crackles through—the florecitas are in aisle seven.

We head there, weaving through more aisles, past displays of packaged comforts and near-familiarities. When I finally find them, they sit low on the shelf, their orange tins big enough to see yet easy enough to overlook. I lift one, rattling it gently, hoping for a scent—but nothing escapes. Still solid in my hands, their presence here is proof: they exist beyond memory.  

For a moment, I debated taking two tins, wondering if they might be seized on the cruise ship the next day. But they should be safe if they are unopened and in their original packaging. Still, my luggage wouldn’t hold two, and the thought of losing them before I could eat them on the open water kept me from taking the risk.  

At the checkout, I pick up pastries for my wife. Guava is a safe choice, something familiar amidst the rows of unknown fruit fillings, flavors popular here but nowhere in my personal history.  

My brother says he wants to treat us, pulling out his ATM card—his Social Security disability account, which I oversee as his representative payee. The cashier, a short, older woman with the quiet authority of someone who has worked here her whole life, scans the items efficiently, without pause.  

I punch in the PIN—numbers for Richard Petty and Jeff Gordon, my brother’s favorite racers. Declined. I tried again, but this time, his birthday was declined.
  
The cashier exhales, mimicking how to slide the card through the reader. The line behind us grows restless, shifting in collective impatience. I asked if I could switch to credit, but I can’t back out of the transaction.  

My brother watches, unbothered, chewing the edge of his thumbnail, waiting for me to solve the problem like I always do. I take out my special Amex—a business card with upper-level privileges—but the cashier isn’t impressed. The line thickens, voices rising slightly in volume, a growing murmur of frustration, disinterest, and waiting.  

I swipe. It goes through like it always does.
  
The tension dissolves as the receipt prints, the final proof of purchase—a transaction completed, a process endured, a place navigated but never truly entered.  

We step outside, my brother carrying the bag. The streets are more familiar now, and the walk back is half as long. I want nothing more than to return to the hotel, hand my wife the pastries, and wash away the grime and quiet shame in the shower. To rest, let exhaustion overtake frustration, and turn my focus forward—toward the cruise, toward the day at sea where I could eat the florecitas without hesitation, without misplaced expectation.  

As we move through the streets, Condado feels smaller. Not because I understand it better but because I no longer need to.
---

Desire Lines

I have wandered every concrete, tarmac, grass, and dirt path near my house. And yet my dog Hurricane, or just plain Cane, knows their way better than I do. He knows when the scent of the trail must yield right, left, or straight ahead. When the desire lines must lead forward to greater passions or the stench of fear should force doubling back.  

Today, Cane is all forward momentum, following the flattened grass past the eroded foot trails, beyond the perfect registration of deer, into the warrens, stopping only in hesitation at the barely-there print of a broad plantigrade walker, its edges pressed into the damp grass, its weight undeniable.  

He knows it as only something bigger than himself. I think that maybe it's a bear, or even worse, something just as patient, just as watching.  

Cane’s nostrils flare. His fur lifts along his spine. Then, he shifts. His body contracts. He pulls inward, ready to turn. And he does turn, but not toward me. His head swivels sharply to the side. His ears cut the air, his body still taut.  

Something is there. Here. Watching.  

I see a figure slip through the brush—low, lean, measured in its movements. A coyote. Its fur is a patchwork of dust and hunger. There is a white, ripped-open kitchen bag in its mouth. Chicken bones and spoiled lettuce leak onto the ground. It stops shy of the clearing, its unblinking eyes fixed on us.  

Cane doesn’t growl. He doesn’t lunge. He knows the difference—how a thing that stalks is different from one that runs.  

But Cane trembles now. His muscles twitch under his fur, breath shallow, a guttural whine slipping through his teeth.  

The coyote tilts its head—slow, deliberate, testing. Then, a shift—a barely perceptible adjustment in weight, its haunches lowering just enough to suggest it is considering the space between us, measuring distance, gauging intent. Its jaw tightens, a subtle flex of muscle beneath the dirt-matted fur, the faintest parting of its lips as if preparing to speak in the only way it knows how.  

I remember my brother, the angler, advising me on what to do in coyote encounters. Hazing, he called it.  

With my free hand, I take my Boricua pride cap off my head and start waving its black shading-to-gray mesh above me. I tug Cane’s leash with my bound hand, forcing him behind me.  

The coyote stiffens but does not yield.  

I shout the most primal, profane thing I can recall in the Spanish I knew before English took over my thoughts.  

“Puta de madre, déjame an mí y a mi perro en paz. Vuelve al agujero infernal de donde viniste.”  

The coyote doesn’t move.  

I stomp at it. I lunge forward, kicking dirt, grass, and twigs into its face. Cane whimpers, tensing further, his weight pressing into my leg like he wants to fold into me, disappear into safer ground.  

Still nothing.  

I pray for a miracle, reciting the prayer my mother taught me for moments of helplessness.  

"God, my Defender, I come to You in fear and helplessness..."  

I pray beyond all the desire lines I knew. Praying to above, to everything, to anyone that can hear and save me.  
Then, the earth quakes beneath us.  

It starts as a distant but insistent hum, building into a growl that swallows the silence. The ground shivers beneath my boots. Then Cane flinches, ears flattening, legs coiled to flee.  

The sound comes first—the grinding roar, the violent protest of metal against stone. Then the scent—gasoline thick in the air, choking the breath from my lungs, mixing with the raw pungency of turned soil. Dust rises, catching in my throat, coating my skin in the residue of a world undone.  

Or renewed?  

The bulldozer bursts through the treeline with no hesitation, no regard for the delicate fractures of the earth beneath its treads. The clearing shifts before my eyes—grass swallowed, warrens collapsed, footprints erased in the wake of industry’s advance. The soft, worn trails Cane and I followed, flattened under the rhythm of our footsteps, are lost beneath metal weight.  

It grinds forward relentlessly, its blade shoving uprooted grass into twisted piles, its treads pressing deeper with each pass, embedding their mark where instinct once did. The scent of earth is overtaken now—by the acrid sting of oil, by heat radiating off steel, by the mechanical certainty that does not pause to consider what was here before.  

The coyote hesitates—just for a breath, just long enough to judge this new threat—then vanishes, a ghost swallowed into the shadows of the trees.  

Cane bolts first, his body snapping into motion, sprinting back down the path we came. I stand there longer than I should, staring at what remains.  

Desire lines—paths shaped by instinct, longing, and familiarity. Each marks an unspoken decision, a pull toward something known or unknown.  

And now, buried.  

The bulldozer moves forward, carving a permanence we cannot undo.  

Cane pauses just ahead, glancing back over his shoulder, his eyes dark and unsure. He does not whine. He does not wait for me. He simply watches—just for a breath—then turns away, retreating with more certainty than I can muster.  

I know I should follow. The path to safety is clear. But for a moment, my feet are heavy, pressed into the dirt like I might leave my own mark here, some proof that I existed before the machines came.  

Then, finally, I turn back, tracing Cane’s desire lines to safety—the ones that lead not toward curiosity but away from ruin.

Final Call  



The screen flickered in the hush of enveloping dark,  
Michael Douglas pacing, his fate unraveling—  
Fatal Attraction, a movie about consequence,  
its shadows pressing forward.  
But beneath the flickering flames, something was wrong,  
settling into my gut like a held breath,  
bending the air—quiet rupture, breath held too long.  

Five minutes home, five minutes into loss.  
Five minutes stretched thin and hollow,  
filled with the weight of dread and waiting,  
filled with the road wounding back to her—  
wounds layered in time, mapped upon fragile feet,  
circling through lineage, waiting in blood.  
Filled with my world shifting.  
My world already shifted.  

The neighbors had already assembled in solemn witness,  
most tight-lipped, others yielding to grief in sobs and silence.  

There was Bill Edwards, the neighbor across the way,  
broad-shouldered, his southern drawl flickering,  
caught between words. Marlene, his portly wife,  
her red hair dimmed beneath the porch light.  
Bernie, their next-door pal, shifting, too large  
for the doorway. Shirley, his second wife, thin,  
arms folded inward, already bracing against absence,  
looking like she had lost the most fragile thing in her life.  

Then movement—the EMTs carrying her body past them,  
in a white nightgown that ended primly just above her knees,  
not in the grandma style she hated,  
but with a quiet grace between youthful innocence  
and the dignified ease of womanhood,  
an elegy stitched into fabric, neither ostentatious nor meek,  
reflecting beauty that lingered, pride that refused to fade.  

The gown bore food stains but no blood. And  
as she passed fully before me,  
her eyes were wide open, lips parted  
in a smile caught between a gasp  
and the ghost of a smile—everything  
lingering between this world and the next,  
frozen, like her, in a moment that never completed itself.  

Ed, my stepdad, stands lost in the doorway,  
his shock sealing him in place,  
his body answering to nothing,  
his stare hollow until it finds me.  

And there—her beige Lazy Boy,  
its footrest still half-kicked from the final trembling,  
handgrips marked by the last imprint of her touch,  
the whole chair pressed with her final form in the fabric.  
The matching chair was untouched, still waiting.  

The television murmurs onward,  
Tom Brokaw, his voice unfazed, reciting history,  
the U.S. and Soviet Union signing a nuclear treaty…  

The world still carrying on.

                                       2

The ambulance pulls away, its lights dim,
not flashing, just retreating—
just driving away,
first a roar, then an echo, then silence.
  
The neighbors start to leave,
offering the usual condolences,
the usual earnest offers of help,
the gestures of grief  that
vanish with the closing of doors,

leaving my stepdad and me
in the almost empty house,
the quiet hum of the house…

And with my younger mentally disabled brother, Casey—
alone upstairs, unaware of mom’s death below,
the murmurs and hands clutching shoulders,
oblivious to the slow procession of mourning,
unaware of the neighbors streaming in and out
in shocked sobs that fold into the walls,
unaware that the one thing that loved him the most
is gone.

I want to call to him, to tell him—  
but the weight of it presses against my throat.  
How do you explain absence to someone  
who has only ever known unconditional presence?  
How do you break the world open like that,  
cut a line through someone’s understanding of love  
and expect them to move forward as if nothing has changed?  

I watch as Ed wipes the last streak of tears  
with the tips of his fingers,
then drag his hand through his forever-gray hair—  
gray since the moment my mother met him,  
gray for every memory I carry of him.
  
The tears have left his face shallow,
heightening his resemblance to Herman Munster
that my mom, myself and the other two kids-
a sister who lives in Alaska, and a brother
lingering between a move from Texas to Colorado-
would kid him constantly about.

The joke was effortless then—  
a source of warmth, an anchor of familiarity.  
Now, I see only the exhaustion in it,  
the quiet collapse of something once harmless,  
the way grief distorts even the gentlest things.

But tonight, the joke is hollow.  
the house, emptier than before.  
And within it, everything that laughter has left behind.

He stumbles into the next big concern,
letting every one know what had happened—
my brother and sister, his two sons
from his first marriage,
one in Chicago, the other chasing Hollywood dreams.

Yet, before he speaks,
he exhales—long, slow—    
as if steadying himself against the weight of it all,  
his hand hovering over the chair’s armrest,  
uncertain, unwilling to disturb  
what was left exactly as she had last touched it.  

Then, the decision.  
He reaches into the left-side pocket  
of her Lazy Boy, pulling out her old address book.  
Its worn pages, folded corners,  
the ink of her handwriting still pressed deep.

He stares at the first number.  
A breath. A pause.  

Then, he dials.  

                                   3

Her absence lingers, curling into corners,  
softening the edges of untouched cups,  
settling into the folds of sheets that will not be remade.  

Her scent—warm spice and detergent—  
clings to the hallway,  
woven into the fabric of the chair that held her.  
Not entirely gone. Not entirely here.  

Even in silence, she speaks:  
A pair of socks with grip bottoms under the table,  
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation left spine-up on a nightstand,  
a grocery list half-scribbled in her hurried hand—  
as if time had paused mid-thought,  
as if the world had allowed one last unfinished line.  

But time does not pause.  
The television hums forward,  
Tom Brokaw shifts to the next news report,
something beyond  the treaty signed,
ink binding nations to restraint.  

And yet, no restraint was given here—  
not to the body unraveling,  
not to the moment that collapsed too soon.  
In a world of precision, she was a miscalculation,  
a faltering equation wrapped in fragile flesh,  
a quiet failure against something too vast to undo.  

I wonder if  what I inherit is more than memory,  
something beyond the way illness carves paths,  
the  denying the way blood carries warnings.  
Each footstep echoes hers,  
each glance at my own hands  
reveals the future she left behind.  

All conversations we never had,  
All questions I never asked—  
Did she know?  
Did she wonder if I would carry this weight?  
Did she hold her own hands in the quiet and wish  
they were not the blueprints of mine?  

And yet, the world is unmoved.  
It does not ask. It does not answer.  

The road outside hums with motion,  
cars rolling forward into the evening.  
Neighbors retreating indoors,  
their grief folded into the rhythm of routine.  

And still—  

The world carries on.
  
                                   4  

Upstairs, the television hums—Baryshnikov gliding  
in white, his movements sharp yet fluid,  
an elegance sculpted in repetition.  
Casey mirrors him, his fingers tracing  
the weightless air, his feet shifting softly—  
a language of motion, untouched by grief.  

I stand in the doorway, the words heavy  
on my mind. The room is a collision—  
rolled up Disney posters on shelves,
glossy brochures of concept cars on his desk,  
beige ballet slippers folded neatly beside  
die-cast models of Mustangs, Corvettes,
on his bureau and nightstands  
the sleek curve of imagined speed.  
Each piece of his world, a fragment,  
a comfort—unchanged, unshaken.  

“Are we leaving soon?” he asks,  
his eyes locked on the screen,  
his breath syncing to the tempo  
of a dancer who understands flight.  

I nod, my throat tight.  
His mind is ahead of me,  
chasing movement, chasing the next step,  
the space between absence and understanding  
still unformed, untouched.  

He twirls his fingers, slow, deliberate.  
He smiles. “I want to show Mom my routine.”  
His joy untouched, whole.  

I inhale. How do you tell someone  
that everything has shifted?  
That love remains, but presence does not?  
That the shape of memory now holds  
all that she was, all that she’ll ever be?  

A flicker—his face tightens,  
a brief tremor, his brows furrowing  
as if the rhythm has faltered,  
as if something in the air has unsettled  
the shape of his movements.  
For a second, I see it—  
a shadow of understanding,  
a glimpse of absence—  
and then, the rhythm returns.  

His hands lift again,  
his feet shift, gentle echoes of Baryshnikov’s grace,  
not the jumps, but the hands,  
the sweep of fingers across invisible space,  
the pull and release of breath  
as if the dance itself could replace  
what is missing.  

And then: “I have rehearsal tonight.”  
His voice steady, matter-of-fact.  

The world is still moving.  

I nod again. “Let’s go.”  

The strip mall is quiet,  
the dance studio tucked between  
a dry cleaner and a bakery,  
its windows humming with light.  

Casey steps in—comfortable, certain,  
a boy in motion, a boy untouched by hesitation.  
The music begins, soft and nostalgic,  
not ballet, not classical precision,  
but something simpler.  
A slide, a rhythm, a quiet homage.  

His feet move with certainty,  
his body following something beyond technique—  
something felt, something known.  

The instructor watches, nods.  
"This is the best he's ever done."  

And I stand there, unmoving,  
watching him, watching the echoes of her  
in the way he lifts his arms,  
the way his posture carries an unspoken grace.  

My chest tightens.  

He is more than what they expected.  
More than the limits they imposed.  
More than the shape of words  
they used to measure him.  

The duet begins—the instructor guiding,  
Casey following,  
his body folding into something  
greater than motion, greater than memory—  
a love pressed into every step,  
every shift of weight,  
every breath between the beats.  

He danced for her.  

And will dance for her always.

One Last Ride


The highway hums beneath us,  
a silver ribbon unspooling, stretching time,  
five hours folding into salt and horizon.  

She sits beside me in the old Chrysler—  
the Town & Country, once dignified,  
now a relic of polish fading into nostalgia.  
The wood paneling still whispers of its golden years,  
though the lacquer has surrendered in places,  
dulled like the memory of Miami Dolphins victories,  
of stadium crowds she can no longer stand among.  

She glances at my brother, now wedged in the middle seat,  
his shoulders stiff, hands curled around his diecast Corvette—  
as if the metal chassis might ground him  
while history repeats in voices above his head.  

And then there was us—  
my older brother championing revolution, fire in his voice,  
me standing firm on the slow burn of policy,  
protest versus legislation, force against persuasion.  
He spoke of upheaval, of torches in the streets,  
of movements that scorched their way into history,  
citing rebellions that shattered regimes,  
the necessity of chaos to unmake oppression.  
I countered with the patience of paper,  
the ink of deliberation, the weight of slow reform,  
the belief that change, to last,  
must be built from within, brick by brick,  
not wrested in the fever of a single night.  

My sister, debating feminism with me,  
weaving tales of male privilege into animated kingdoms—  
deconstructing Beauty and the Beast,  
challenging the politics of princesses.  
I fired back with counterpoints  
built on Disney’s quiet revolutions,  
quoting Ariel's defiance, Mulan’s resilience,  
arguing the incremental shift—  
that fairytales were learning,  
however imperfectly, to unmake their past.  
She scoffed, naming the villains still drawn too charming,  
the heroines still shaped too gently.  

And between us, my younger brother sat,  
rolling his toy wheels across his thigh,  
waiting for us to grow bored of history,  
to let silence settle in  
like dust in the seams of a worn-out car.  

My mother sighs, brushing a hand across the dashboard,  
the way she once smoothed the wood veneer  
on our old living room console,  
fingers ghosting over the static  
before the game crackled into motion.  

The 1972 Dolphins—perfect in record,  
immortal in memory.  
She remembers how we all crowded around that screen,  
stepdad balancing a plate of nachos and salsa,  
her own voice sharp with joy  
when Kiick took it in for the score.  

I can almost hear her say it now—  
“They never did it again, but once was enough.”  
And I wonder if she means football,  
or life itself.  

The hotel room exists between versions of itself,  
half-modern, half-forgotten—  
maroon carpet fraying at the corners,  
a sleek lamp that doesn’t match the floral wallpaper,  
a desk too new for its wobbly chair.  
Even the light flickers like it can’t decide  
if it belongs in this decade or the last.  
It is a room in limbo, much like us.  

She settles into the bed,  
the pillows stacked carefully beneath her spine,  
the weight of the drive melting into crisp sheets.  
On the TV, The Best Years of Our Lives flickers—  
Frederic March raising his glass,  
Harold Russell tracing the contours of a future  
without the hands he once knew.  

She sighs when Homer tries to hold Wilma,  
the way his body betrays him,  
the way she stays, unflinching.  
The scene quiets something deep in her—  
the knowing that loss cannot be outrun,  
only softened by those who refuse to look away.  

My sister calls from Alaska,  
says the northern lights flared last night,  
green ribbons curling like seaweed in sky.  
She asks if I can send pictures of anything  
her daughter might sketch—  
a streetlamp bending against the wind,  
the way light fractures through a rain-streaked window.  
Then, her voice shifts, careful now, measured—  
she speaks of the future, of what is fair,  
what is owed, what might be promised  
when the weight of care no longer rests  
in my mother’s hands.  
What will be reimbursable,  
what should belong to whom,  
what it means to inherit responsibility  
instead of just the things left behind.  
And always, beneath the calculations,  
my brother—  
who will watch over him,  
who will decide the shape of his world  
when the one who knows him best  
is gone.  

My brother in Oregon speaks of rivers,  
his voice full of exact false cheer,  
the kind meant to mask a quiet weariness.  
He talks about cold hands gripping a fishing rod,  
of waiting for something unseen  
to take the bait,  
of how trout move like ghosts beneath the surface.  
And beneath his words, another thought lingers—  
his wife, frail as she is,  
how she will need tending,  
how responsibility never truly passes,  
only shifts shape,  
only finds new hands to hold it.  

And then there is the shape of what’s to come—  
the joy and the breaking of it, the laughter and its echo.  
A wedding, the shimmer of promise,  
then papers signed in quiet rooms,  
the weight of goodbye settling into drawers.  

A body betraying itself, the stark syllables of diagnosis,  
the fight, the frailty, the waiting, the return—  
cancer like a storm that bruises the bones,  
then fades into remission,  
leaving only the knowledge  
that not all things come back untouched.  

The love of my brother, steady as the road beneath us,  
the joy of tending, the ache of duty,  
the fear of expectations unfolding  
in silent negotiations I do not yet understand.  

And then maybe a tornado,  
ripping through the known world,  
splitting the timbers of a home  
that once stood unwavering.  

But a new house will rise,  
new walls will carry voices,  
new foundations will hold weight—  
my brother, my wife, my dog,  
a life remade in the wind’s aftermath,  
a future stitched from everything that came before.  

And my mother—  
she watches my younger brother  
the way a lighthouse watches the dark,  
aware of the storms ahead,  
of the care I must carry  
when she no longer can.  

She hums the Dolphins’ fight song softly before bed,  
a hymn to all that lingers, to all that fades.  
Then, almost without thinking,  
her voice shifts, slipping into Belafonte,  
A Hole in the Bucket, the rhythm of trying, of mending,  
of things that will never quite be whole.  
Then Day-O, a call to the dawn,  
a melody of labor and waiting,  
the night giving way to the light  
that does not always come.  

She came from thirteen—  
six brothers, seven sisters,  
her name the last written on the family roll call,  
though not the last to leave.  
She will be the middle one to go,  
just after the final brother,  
after the first three sisters,  
her place in the lineage somewhere between memory  
and the spaces left behind.  

And I wonder—  
when the tide turns,  
when the wind shifts,  
who will sing it for her?

The Widening Sky**  

I feel myself shrinking,  
walking the night beach  
under the ever-widening sky.  

The sand clings to my feet,  
then is washed away  
in the tide’s haste  
to kiss the shore,  
only to recoil  
when it tastes  
the grit of life—  

the ancient attraction-repulsion  
born the moment  
the first creature rose from the sea,  
breathed, lingered  
on the still, silent sand.  

And I recall my mother’s lullaby,  
a hushed song that once swayed the air,  
telling of the slip that heard  
Mother Ocean call—  
no longer a command  
but a longing,  

a tide reaching, retreating,  
pleading for what once was hers:  

"Oh, dear sea-child of mine,  
I weep when I hear  
your quiet refusal—  
you will not return  
to my salt-bound embrace."  

Her voice, low and wavering,  
held the weight of salt-laden sorrow,  
a plea stretched thin  
like foam dissolving at the shore.  
Each refrain a remnant,  
each pause a hesitation—  
as though waiting for me  
to answer.  

From behind and beyond,  
the feelers of Calypso unfurl,  
know of the colorfully dressed  
streams that live in pastel houses—  

my neighbors’ voices, celebrating on  
the tarmac street, carving a clean  
divide between sand and sea  
and the subdivision’s order.  

Not hands nor voices,  
but motion and rhythms,  
a swirl of sounds  
pulsing under steel drums—  

a force, a motion,  
the sway of limbs,  
a rhythm spilling from windows,  
tugging my breath,  
threading through the percussive air.  

And yet, beyond the curb’s edge,  
the tide still stretches,  
its foamy fingers outstretched—  
not grasping, not demanding,  
just waiting—  
lapping once, twice,  
a quiet pulse returning  
to the depths.  

The wind gathers the tide’s sigh,  
folds it into the music of the street,  
lifts it beyond houses, beyond roads,  
carrying the hush of salt and longing  
farther than any wave could reach—  

where, in the cooling night,  
a trace of brine lingers in the air,  
where the wind turns brackish,  
faint as a whisper,  
the ocean still breathing its call,  
a whisper curling at the edge of sound,  
the ocean still exhaling its call.  

I see a conch shell in the glowing darkness,  
pick it up, watch its pink body  
retract into its protective shelf.  

I feel awe at this tiny creature's ability  
to deny my ear the simple desire  
to hear the song of the ocean.  

I drop it on the sand,  
witness the tide kiss and cradle it.  

For a moment, I stay still,  
listening—  
to the hush of salt and steel drum echoes,  
to the tide’s patient pull  
and the rhythms spilling through open windows.  

Something shifts.  

The pull of the tide is no longer stronger  
than the pulse of the street.  
I withdraw into the nacre of myself,  
disappearing so far into the dark  
that I vanish from the night’s sight.  

Then, Calypso draws me to the block party.  
In the haze of the streetlight,  
I am the same size as all the other revelers—  

no more or less significant than  
anyone else in this vast sea of love.

The empty lot of the abandoned car dealership
is overrun with dandelions, thistles, and sticker weeds.

On the right is a Baptist church standing
sternly against the invasive plants.  

The ministry’s gardener sprays Roundup
on the weaker creepers while his assistant
uses a torch on the deeply rooted ones.  

On the left is a BBQ specializing in Nashville Hot Chicken.  

Congregants fill the abandoned spaces on Sundays,
parking in every white-lined spot.  

On weekdays, the meat, pork, and poultry adherents
occupy the fringes of the cracked tarmac.

Saturdays are the days for the wildflowers to bloom,
the sticker weeds to cling to the cuffs of children’s pants,
and the hindquarters of every sniffing dog.

Church festival days were the time for the lot to be filled
with popcorn, churro, and taco carts-
ring toss, balloon pop, and fish bowl toss booths-
a bounce house, and the heroes of the Bible
obstacle course for the children.

Halloween week was the one time the BBQ joint
had the lot to itself. It erected a tent of horror
filled with demons, bedsheet ghosts, and demented chainsaw-wielding dwarves. The finale featured
the patrons being strapped to an altar and exorcised
by a defrocked priest and ******* clad nuns.

The other scary ride was the tunnel of love and marriage.  Couples were faux-married by a maniacal judge and,
by the end, were divorced by the jurist’s serial killer twin. What happened in between the nondisclosure agreements everyone signed kept it all private and secret.

Since the horror house made a lot of money and the church received a large sponsor donation,    
the deacons ignored the false sins and degradations.
  
Anyway, by Monday, the altar was gone,  
the neon horror tent collapsed and  
the sticker weeds reclaimed their corners,  
waiting for the next act.

Most days, I drive past it all—the sermons,
the spice rub, the ghost  dealership, the exorcisms,  
and I wonder if this patch of cracked asphalt  
knows what it is. Or if it even matters.

But nothing stops the dandelions from
dancing in the breeze and car exhaust air,
singing their minor chord hallelujahs to life.
        
On Sundays the faithful return to their pulpits.
By Fridays, the altar is a karaoke stage,  
with the pastor belting out “Highway to Hell”  
between deep-fried sermons.

And then lunch at the BBQ on the other side.

I don’t worry how my old clothes  
will look on their new owners at Goodwill.  
They have places to be,  
stories to live  
beyond my closet.  

Still, letting go feels strange.  
I hesitated at the donation bin,  
fingers brushing fabric worn soft  
by years of routine.  
Shirts that carried me through long days,  
pants that held their shape  
even when I didn’t,  
sweaters that wrapped me in warmth  
when I needed comfort.  
Familiar, reliable—  
but clothes, like memories,  
aren’t meant to be hoarded.  

And maybe, I realize,  
I am ready to let them go—  
ready to make space  
for the person I am becoming,  
not just the one I have been.  

Now, my shirts might end up  
on a college kid,  
worn soft from late-night study sessions,  
coffee stains mapping out  
their ambitions.  

My pants could find a new home  
with a dad who needs extra pockets  
for snacks, keys, and crumpled receipts  
from weekends spent chasing his kids.  

A Dolphins t-shirt might land  
in the hands of someone  
who doesn’t even watch football,  
but wears it anyway  
because it fits just right—  
or because aqua and orange  
make them feel bold.  

Some pieces will travel far,  
stuffed into suitcases  
heading toward new cities,  
new jobs, new beginnings.  
Others will stay close,  
worn by someone  
who just needed  
a warm sweater on a cold night.  

I won’t know where they go,  
but I like to think they’ll be loved,  
threadbare in all the best ways,  
living new lives  
I’ll never see.  

And as I walk away,  
hands empty, closet lighter,  
I expect to feel loss—  
but instead, I feel space.  
Room for new stories,  
new routines,  
new warmth—  
not just in fabric,  
but in the quiet that remains.  

Maybe I’ll fill it with something new,  
or maybe I’ll leave it open,  
letting the quiet remind me  
that not everything needs replacing.  
That sometimes,  
emptiness is its own kind of comfort,  
a soft place to grow into something new.

I dialed the landline to my childhood home,  
let it ring into the past—  
again and again and again

I knew my parents wouldn’t answer.
They're both dead.
Still, the ringing soothed—  
each unanswered tone
a promise that someone,
anyone, might answer.

After ten rings, a recorded message came on.
The voice was full of girly twang
and the snap and pop of bubble gum.

The voice I heard was nothing like my mother.  
It was the mother I once imagined—  
carefree, untouched by the cigarette rasp,  
free of the heavy, deliberate tone  
that braced against disappointment.  
Not the chant of a woman  
who saw no promise in herself, only in her children.

Beyond my window, a sparrow circles,  
returning to the nest it has built—  
a place that still remembers its shape.  

The message ended.  
I let the silence stretch,  
listened to the emptiness  
on the other end,  
then hung up.

I noticed the heat bending
through the window's refraction
wondering if revisiting the past  
quenches nostalgia for the dead,  
gives my parents a proper ending.

I watched other people mowing my small lawn
under a bright sky,
listened to Spanish pop blaring from tiny speakers,
the music drowning out the din
of nail guns attaching shingles
to all the houses being built beyond.  

I move with the moment,
opening the window
to take in the scent of just-clipped grass,
dancing awkwardly to this music with lyrics
I can barely hear in a language
I'm learning to understand—  
laughing until my belly hurts

Like everyone else,
I can only step through the gate
my mother and father took to enter this world.
I must exist in the space their bodies made.  

Their walk set my path and determined my streets.
I hear their voices in the crunch of the compressed gravel of every footfall—echoes of their stories
I lived and never lived.

Where the dust remembers their steps,
I wander off until the road narrows,
and no clear way forward forces me to double back.  

What remains of them clings to me—
their names,  gestures, their quiet inheritance.
I step forward, but the gate never closes behind me.

Things are going as planned.  
My mother died.  
My father died.  
I am alive
and bound to fate

I recite the mantra to myself:  
"A father is fate,"  
drawing the Harrow  
along my fetid soul,  
turning over what was planted in me,  
digging up the weight of his will.

But a counterchant arises,
the one I will use
as the border wall
against this seeding:
“A mother is the memory of mystery."
Her voice plants itself in the silence,  
a reseeding against the pull of his fate,
a defiance growing in the spaces he left behind.

Perhaps that is why my parents died the proper way,  
never knowing how the mystery  
of their three childless children’s lives  
would resolve itself.  
Perhaps they believed  
things left unresolved,  
questions left unanswered,  
were never meant to be—  
that silence itself was an inheritance.  

We were all improper boys in their eyes,
following their path—
but only far enough to leave the family herd behind.
I was the easy one,
the silent, observant child,  
the one who did not rebel,  
but carried no mystery or fate in him,
only the moral weight of a conflicting inheritance.

My father died in peace,
leaving no holes in his life,
not even a burial, just his ashes.
And his boys with all
the usual unresolved regrets,
the proper amount of moral pain
to grieve him properly.

My mother’s death was the pit
in the universe that opened up
a thirty year hell in her sons. She left a mess-
sickly, poor, and with nothing to grant
but her good memories and a moral clarity
torn to tatters by the unscrupulous.

The older took to drugs trying to give her justice.
The younger was too innocent of mind
to truly know and care.  And as far as myself,
the silent observant, middle one—

there are reasons
good mothers die
and poems are meant
to live forever—

there are reasons.

I walked to the end of the pier
and could not throw your ashes into the sea.

It was easy with my father—
to see his blackness float in the air
and settle on the wrack line,
neither the earth nor sea’s possession.

But you, dear friend, my lost sister
not of the soul but of pain, solitude, loneliness,
of God demanding that I love the abandoned,
I can not throw back only to see you
return to me a wounded speckled fish.

The tide against the timber piles beat their hieroglyphics, scattering the swans on your urn to the nearest oblivion.
The sky’s darkness matches your grey ashes,
and the grit of the sea’s salt renders you colorless
as my hand skims over your lightness.

I cried, realizing you would never become
water, wind, or earth.
You would be just a swimmer caught in a riptide,
struggling to escape by navigating to the shore,
always coming back to me enough to pull you safely through
as you trusted I would do,
knowing God left me no other choice.  

Hooked to me, I carry your wound
as I watch schools of silverfish
swimming away from the pier.
I cap your urn,  cradling your ashes
to the warmth of my side.  
“I would never be through,”
I whispered to your ashes,
the sky, my silent father,
                      to myself.

I feel at home at Taco Bell, as the cuisine
echoes the worst of my mom’s cooking:
cheese that tastes like beans,
beans that taste like rice,  
rice that tastes like flour.

It’s where I go when I am missing someone,
usually near their Jesus’ hour, between
the last sip of a lunch hour Pepsi
and the first after school Cinnabon
Delights clutched and munched
in little fingers.

I'll lean in whenever a raven haired Circe
at a corner table, resembling Sabrena—
that witch who first broke my heart—
casts a disdainful glance my way.

They’ll tug at the corners of their
bad girl leather jacket, gather
their familiar charms, and
shoot me a bird as
they vanish in
the smoke of
memory.

And then, on some evenings, customers
with my mother’s laugh will walk in
and then out, their arms cradling
grease-slicked terracotta bags,
sacred relics in the
fluorescence.

The smell of cheap tacos in brittle shells
filled with Hamburger Helper,
gummy cheese, old lettuce,
canned diced tomatoes-
that heavenly mess
masquerading as
a meal would
pull me back  
to her
cocina.    

In the haze of the Taco Bell fryers, the grease
sings of her failures and resilience.  Like her,
I would smile through it all—always
apologizing yet always trying—
in the end,  scraping meat
off chipped plates

remembering my mother’s taco shells and
refusing to wipe away the grease,
letting it linger an echo of
loves imperfect folds.

This is the first time I've been in this mango grove,
hearing the iguaca sing, since my parents left this island

It is mid-July and I am wearing my dad’s old hat palm pava    
square and jaunty on my balding crown


quietly stealing this fleshy passion fruit, its skin warm on my palm, eager to be ******, before the jibaro with their cutting poles awaken—


these violently soft things who delight in the rude noises
made in the slush of their kissing—


their fibers glad to be forever stuck in my teeth
pretending beginnings on new beginnings.                                            

“This year, the mangoes are abundant,” my father used to say to me, his voice blending with the birdsong.

He takes a bite and hands me its yellow-red splendor
to try.  Instantly, I am heartbroken—pierced and open.

I realize, this will be my last time here in this shifting, slow heat  
and I will struggle to remember and feel what it was like  

                                            to touch and eat-- abundant mangoes.

My brother is an angler
devoted to the stream
that pools around long boots,
making the slow cast
that gently whips and
ripples the surface with
a reel that knows
the proper weight
of the scales below.

Gone are the days when
he fished Crandon Pier
while sitting on
an overturned paint bucket with
a cheap red and white bobber
and a cane pole,
competing with the gulls
for the punniest sea prize.

Now he fishes
the Rogue's eternal flow,
its waters murmuring unseen truths
far from shadowy gray terns’ jeers  
that steal his peace—
fishing in steadfast streams  
that let his boots
anchor him to
the quiet pulse of home.

When the earth is no longer a womb,
just a shriek and whistle of once uttered prayer—
a long,
puncturing howl of everything
that was once you
turned into casualties of silence,
then you know
that death has arrived,
noiselessly,
silent as a missile.

All the clamor outside-
it’s the hibakujumoku,
(the survivor trees)
insisting on life
within the blast radius
of your heart.

It’s been over  
thirty-five years since  
I felt your motherly touch,  
and I no longer try to shape  
a garden of sorrow.  
Instead, I let the new grass flame,  
its green distinct from the old cold fire,  
whose embers tighten their ring  
with each passing year.  

I find joy in the crepe myrtles  
unfolding into white,  
and the masses of yellow blossoms  
nestled in low bushes  
lining my walk to the gravel path—  
the one leading from the woods  
to your lone grave.  

Grief is no longer larger  
than the heart of your memory,  
for around me blooms  
everything you left behind.  

I watch your granddaughter,  
small as your grave marker,  
wander past your woods  
to the open meadow beyond,  
the whiter flowers she calls  
her playthings.  

And I will follow,  
fall among those flowers,  
sink into the soft moss  
by the marsh—  
where her laughter carries echoes  
of your voice,  
where the petals hold the warmth  
of new hands.  
I will lie near the meadow’s edge,  
close to her,  
and closer still to you.

I tried on several of my father’s
old Brooks Brother suits
just before his funeral,
trying to save myself the expense
of an outfit I didn't need.  

Each was too tight on the collars.
too short on the sleeves, each
crotch inseam strangled my manhood.
I had outgrown them all.

Almost all of it will go to Goodwill-
except maybe for those old coal wingtips,
(still in their slightly battered but original box)
heels and soles worn down from hospital rounds,
the leathers evenly laced, spit and
polished to a proper navy shine,
solid and smooth, enough to go from
monolithic to Marley vinyl
without missing a beat.

I could almost hear “The Great Pretender”
play as he glided my future mom
(literally,”The Beauty Queen of Fulton Burrough”)
across the ballroom floor, and then,
suddenly stop, and leave her,
as the hospital pager buzzed on his belt.

All my father- a short, balding but
approachable looking guy, with the
devil’s goatee- ever needed to win
my mother over, was Nat King Cole.
What he left her with, was Harry Belafonte
swooning his existential sorrows out to her-
“Day-o, midnight come and I want to go home.”

I smelled the stale odor of talc
distinguishing itself from moth *****,
and was tempted to slip them on,
but figured the cost to resole them
wouldn't be worth the price. Besides,
that oxblood polish would be too hard
to find.  I left them there for the next
tenant to decide their fate.

I journey towards the night
watching the light recede.
Awaiting me, an unsteady
dreamscape of losing
things and beings
and never finding them.

But, there is also the ocean,
of waves cradling me to sleep
with the lullaby of my name’s
repetition- marooning me  
from the sound of others,
the fears, anxieties to come.

Yet, my unconscious tugs me
towards the new tomorrow, forcing
my drowsy mind to count backwards
from sixty to one, until the gravity and  
heaviness retreats into the
light and life to come—

the awakening that  turns
the dark blue inside to light blue sky,
the rising eastern glow that is
the morning star affirming
to my eyelids that this dark life
was just a dream of my fretful mind.

Awaiting me, the to-do list of my morning:
the ritual of the toilet, scale, finger ******,
Psyllium powder stirred in water, catering
to my dog’s and wife’s love language of
gourmet kibble and Nescafe— an  A.M.  life
measured out in watery tablespoons of love.

The cadence of my feet lives itself out in
thirty steps and half minute treks, a sacred
pitter-patter in rhythm with my breath that
allows the traumas of the past- the dead, the
cancers, the broken houses destroyed and rebuilt-
to exist in hidden memories and bad dreams.

When the car burst onto the empty highway,
the bridge stretched long over the river,
and the faint glow of streetlights
bathed the dashboard in a soft, cold light,
not bright, but a subtle wash
profoundly changing my thoughts.
Suddenly I wanted to feel clarity,
to dive deep into my center,
marriage and divorce throwaway words
for the deep sensation of home,
knowing I was once made to belong,
that I am both the home and the wanderer,
there, known, the place near-far
that I don’t know I need till I return.

What was it in the highway’s trance
that made me question so much about us?
The good and the bad, the love and the fights,
to stay or to walk away, I do not know
except, unknown to myself,
I carry the weight of my parents’ echoes—
Mom, frail in the hospital bed,
complications of diabetes wearing her down,
Dad, distant and angry,
his resentment a slow burn of injustice.

As my thoughts mirror theirs,
I think of my children—
a boy of six, a girl of eight,
their innocence and laughter,
their small hands and endless questions.
Fatherhood, an anxious dance
between fear and fleeting success,
my ambivalence heavy and lingering.

And my job, a professional manager
in a downsizing company,
uncertainty a constant companion,
the weight of decisions on my shoulders.
But even amidst the turmoil,
a flicker of hope remains,
the thought of returning home,
the possibility of a good future,
of being the father and husband
my children and wife deserve.

night drapes
day spreads
stars emit light
moons conceal dark
around the north star-fire
away from the south moon-water
stars journey
moons remain
in their wake
at their rest
stories extend
stories retract

In the mist,
black granite,
linked scales
melt away—
memories of
Times Square,
Broadway’s past.

From afar,
the ******
of a music box
is heard—
a hopeful melody,
almost a lullaby.

From below,
the street
pleads a prayer
to the broken sky—
“just a haunting,
gentle touch.”

Soon,
the morning breaks
over two towers
built and rebuilt-
over coffee, doughnuts—
old promises kept,
new promises
broken and rebroken.

Yet,
there is the hope
of new beginnings
rising through the
steaming sewer lids,
the proud
lady in the harbor    
seeing once again

New York awaken..

Summer wind hold my hand,
grasp it, rub it gentle  in the  sun
honeyed soothing mother’s touch.

Hide the coughing chimneys up ahead,
the night in the strut of yellow cat eyes,
amber streetlights yielding to blue tv glows.

Coming cold blows my hands into jacket tight.
The star I follow now hidden,  dark,
lost in the arguing noise outside and in.

Birds know the way home,
the door that has their name or
how to sing it into existence, if lost.

Through it they find each other
even in a burning world—
they find their being.

And in that last lost sky
they sing it into their feet,
combine it with the dirt’s prophecy.

Look up in the sky, at the birds
and praise these passerine who
can sing open doors we cannot.

The treaty they have made with
the sky includes us for they
treasure the world’s wholeness.

My America undresses its wounds to the world—
the Fathers memories living in torn clouds
and forgetful weather scribbled over in black.

The  new gods lick mine/our bones clean,
leaving the crumbs for the hungry aban-
doned by their once great country.

(All the bombs, the rockers red glare
can't create patriots better than
the Fathers good words.)

My flag once was my father(s) (and) mother’s.
Their true anthem, every word, every
single word, can now only be whispered.

Now,I watch the new gods in their jealousy
seek to colonize the world’s children
to maim those wishing only a gentle touch.

I cry as I imagine the true God,
witnessing his sons deported— the
new gods aiming rifles at the rest.

There is a song that will never be
not one of a crooning summer breeze
but of smothered dreams in ***** streets—

Those buried in shrouds of leaves
plucked from maple trees,
couched in green moss or
in lovely silks on soft downy beds

will never know those
who died on a freezing night,
a bottle by their side or
a needle in their arm.—

The lucky who lived and died
their dreams, earned laurel crowns
will never know the nightmare ones
murdered in their sleep just for fun.

Those who dream of seeing heaven,
rising beyond the drop of stars
with a chorus of trailing nightingales
and a full bench of funeral soloists

pay no heed to those *****, ragged ones,
with the infected heart who fell into the
road  pummeled by wheels that just rolled on—
loud music playing over their last silent notes.

In the rose of their blood, these murdered lie,
the violet of the violent passing bye-—
a thousand moonbeams strong filing  their
unmarked resting spot to the manicured tombs.

The Appalachians exist in their eroded presence,
peaks grinded  down to almost lower hills,
erasing the mountains once majesty
to a smoothing, a faded promise
of God lost in time’s neglect,
barely seen in flyover.

These mature mountains once outreached the Himalayans,
the younger brother barely beyond its grasping infancy-
(older even than the dozen watery icy rings of Saturn)
ceding  a layer of itself every natural  millennium,
to the red oaks and pines that rule its base.

These crags once knew the seasons when the flowers died
but now know  only black bear, white-tailed deer,
wild boar, fox, raccoon, and  ******, below;
the golden eagles, ravens in the cliffs—
the schoolchildren,  hikers, climbers
who wander its ancient trails,
seeking  the orology of  stone  
vanished in decaying time.

It’s Brown Mountain Lights hold tantalizing  human mysteries-
unexplained orbs drifting through shadowed peaks,
silently piercing the fear veil of the mortal  mind,
whispering ghostly rumors through the pines,
ethereal terrors shrieking down the cliffs,
a secret eternally lingering in its air.

The Cherokee call this sacred sinister Land of Blue Smoke Shaconage-
made by the giant hawk Tawodi wearily circling a flooded earth
which plummeted to the ground in exhaustion.
Where its vast wings hit Elohi (earth)
the mountain valleys appeared.  

Now the Appalachian twilight whisper echoes of Wampus Cats
patrolling the woods, protecting with legend the mountains
from the minds destruction that  broods beyond itself.
The mothman watches from the Tennessee’s edge,
its wings unfurling in the foreboding dimness,
a silent sentinel guarding present and past.
From the other bank Old Joe Clark fiddles
his mournful tune of abandoned paths
and forgotten times.

(after Richard Blanco)

I barely remember myself in the sway of these palms
Fifty years on I’ve lost the language of these breezes
along with almost all my childhood Spanish.
Good Morning, Buenas Dias
runs into Good Night, Buenas Noches.  
I can no longer live out the passion of my youth
without cancer intruding some melancholy lyrics.
On the good side—my poetry gets
the balance my present  can’t achieve.
The two are my loyal loves,
mournfully-joyously kissing my feet
as I stroll this shoreline and glance back
to see my footprints washed away in the tide line.
The salt air provides no salves— just stings,
forcing me to live with all my joyous regrets.  
All I’ve done right or wrong
lives with enough and not enough.
Who am I?  What should I do?
The always answer:
everything and nothing.

Skin


I felt the skin of my father—
his thumb a soft shawl
that enveloped our
intertwined hands.

And when the embrace broke—
how my tiny fingers traced
the moss line of his skull
until it became a familiar garden.

How he would embrace mother, after-
wards in her floral gown, so tenderly, that
I would sneak in later to smell the
trace of his skin on her every thread.

After they both passed away my grief
prodded me to smell his (and her) gonenes
on my body, their last skin living in
hard, heavy knots on my face and  hands.

At  night, in the skin of sleep,
he (she) tumbles out in a
nub of bones, his (her) memories
crawling on my skin, an open wound.

(After Ella Wheeler Wilcox)



Love speaks:
in the youthful flush of the first true kiss
in the shy averting eye that hesitates
to take this beautiful moment in
without fainting.

Love speaks
In the silent reserve
of the heart’s tremble
the still and ache
of hidden emotions

Love speaks
in the ghosting of nearness
the unshed tears that  fears
the  expressing of joy
that the breast barely contains.

Love speaks
in the humble spirit
that traces the tender light
that falls on the contours
of their lover’s face.  

Love speaks
in the wild words of purple poesy
that heightens the fire
the lightning and the mighty storms
that speaks the untrue truth
hidden in the

delight  
pain
madness
bliss
the rapture.

In my late hunger I listen to the swirl of night traffic, until
it dies around the curb— recedes into remembrance,

to that melting space inside— the sound
matching the tempo of my lowest need,

getting lost in the evening’s reflection—
ice memories melting to water,

everything moving to my traffic flow—
to the single track of my inside voice.

Exhausted, endured,
my  veins
touch the moon's hope—

this faded celebration
that keeps clinging
to possibilities beyond—

amongst these pallid faces,
silent companions,
the burdened

looking down this
sterile room,
pale walls,

who surrender
to sleep so easily,

unheedful of this
moon child

listening to only
the comforting whisphers
just ahead.

1    
I eat thistles to do away with
my hunger for green life,

capturing in pixel ****** what
my prying eyes can not evade.

The forest offers no inheritance,
every branch has its best name


                          2
I wish to learn and know the work
songs of smaller, silent things,

blend not into the shrubs but rocks,
the mutes of this dry and dying land,

join the procession of farmers mourning
the lost voice of closeness to the earth.

                          3
These hands that  no longer clasp or
knead are but the repeated gestures

of an uvulating tongue that knows
that the egg in a pool of oil will

yield a dry dough of double thistles
in the purple slanted sunsets to come.

I fall back into the comfort of our once existence.
every time the  other sibs cry out your absence
in black texts- how they MISS YOU SO MUCH.
And yet, your stories are my memories.
In their writing down I am there with you, so much.
There with you -mom- in that old faded yellow Chevrolet
traveling the black top of highways and backroads-
you in the driver seat until it was my turn-
the white lines coding out our secret message-
GO- LET US KEEP GOING.

I found the city a pitiless thing.
It smelled of steel, concrete and the bay.
I use to sit on the sea wall that edged
my old college condo, the one I shared
with a black cat, and sing Otis Redding-
skipping the whistling part of his song
because my lips could never purse the
right tune- and watch the tide roll in
catching rainbows in the sun’s glint.

It  was the inhabitants I couldn’t take,
all rude and loud, smelling of salt
and stale fish scales and crab shells,
so snared in tiny toils, frail and idle,
their itching needs thirsty and *****.  
I lost my wonder in the traffic dust,
the night haze and starless nights.
I avoided touching that life less
it should defile me in its lost light,
night terrors and phantasms.

Then, in the small church in
the out of the way corner,
I found her, a strange vision
trembling, ready to emerge
just past the reach of my mind
and the urge of my will. She existed
beyond all jaded aims and
drab  dissemblements,
something unfounded, unbuilt
but ready, waiting to be built on.

On my birthday she bought me
a lounge chair to grace my
unfurnished balcony, on the
very day I purchased my own.
And there we sat (my desire),
watching the city unseal itself
across from me in a sweltering love,
constantly revealed, being
forever built and rebuilt on
in pain and unfathomable will.

The ramshackled town falls quiet
to the artist’s eye in the retreating light.
The old houses will truce their aged lumber,
antiquity, for the invading dark beauty of his creation.

He lived here once as a boy, in the sadness of his angels,
held hostage (he thought), by the catechism of  church
and steeple, becoming  a refugee from sawdust and faith,
believing being an exile will open his eyes to the truth.

He had returned from his long sojourn in the East
after seeing and experiencing the freedom of the world,
determined to posses this tract, once green space,the mountain beyond— to surrender it all, to the truth he  knew.


The canvas submitted to his violence.  The brushes
knew again, the small wars between mind and nature.
The hunger, the hunger, the hunger of eternal creation  
that rises from the wanderlust in every artist and poet.    

He did not listen to their prayers for mercy.
He wailed in his starvation “Come! Come!”
The shades of town, mountain, flower, deer, came.
And, as he must, he destroyed and devoured it all.

Time’s diminishments adds its own beauty
in gratitude for moments that are not ours:

the child tiptoes into the mother’s bedroom
and silently witnesses her comb her hair,

later listens to her snore, transferring to
them the transient lyrics of the song of life-

the lines that survive  the well of nights,
the rose thorns to bloom in their mouths

until it’s stamped in their bodies—
this trapped time to live all over again.

My mother’s name is lost
to everyone beyond her children.

“She was beautiful.
What was her name?”,
others would say to me  
when shown her image
hanging silently on the wall.

In the chanting of it—their wind
echoes my death back in a cloud
of disinterested kindness
and muttered miseries.
  
They know only their faces,  
the renamed mountains and rivers,
the new language of their exile.

Not that—
she was wind born—
knew her better name.

In that living moment
the bullet goes right by me—
and in between all my prayers
and my eternal gratitude —
the child behind me dies.  
“Why did it  spare
me and not him?”,
I think over and over again—
counting the lifetime of wishes
that now will never
come true for him.—

It goes right by me—
penetrating present and future—
—dreams and nightmares—
I will sleep an hour more tonight—
—tomorrow, an hour less—
less—less until the end of my lifeline.
Out of all the others who’ve died
I will remember this child— little boy
in the depth of my veins and
the light rain that continuously falls—
even as the bullet goes by and bye.—
pass the fence to his grave.—

The bullet goes by me—
cutting through my words—
my sad attempt of an elegy for him—
all the grief that my soul strives to forget—
It goes right by me—
chance— unsmiling me for a lifetime.—

When the fence was finished
and properly white washed
he wrote TRUTH
all in large block white.
on his side
that faced the street.

The next day, his neighbor
of many years,
of which he knew
only through casual hellos,
painted (in bleeding red)
TREASON on his.  

“God Save America,” the first thought ,
“from this POS” as he drove  his  EV to work,
content knowing he had his neighbor all figured out.
The neighbor thought the same as he passed him
in his POS  Ford— the one he inherited from his father-
the one with the  fender cracks held  together
with $ store American. flag  bumper stickers.

Under the bardo of the sheltering sky
mist and fog cleave earth from heaven.
The green  liminal land  abscission’s itself-
shivering swallows from boughs,
causing the wiltering river reed
to bend away from the first frazil ice—
and the grazing horse to return to hay by
following the frosting road back to the barn.

The fifth season has arrived,
sneaking in between summer and fall,
changing everything green to yellow,
then to fire and ash—
suspending earth and air until
nature decides the next breath.


bardo:  (in Tibetan Buddhism) a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person's conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death.

Liminal:  Liminal space is the uncertain transition between where you've been and where you're going physically, emotionally, or metaphorically.

abscission:   the natural detachment of parts of a plant, typically dead leaves and ripe fruit.

Frazil:  soft or amorphous ice formed by the accumulation of ice crystals in water that is too turbulent to freeze solid.