Category: Writer

This is what we did

This is the past that I created, the one I still think may be real:

We lived in a poor, jubilant village, crowded with colors and chickens and goats and children, and we all vied for attention and affection. There were loud voices from our fathers, who sweat through old lime T-shirts and black-market Wranglers. They worked meager jobs, and were paid with dirt and flour, black beans and strong coffee. And there were the lyrical demands of our mothers, who swept and sighed and shouted and cooked, and we adored them above all others. We did not know they were unequal, because nobody told us. When did this happen?

I do not know who decided that one was better than the other. Who reasoned that the men who worked the hardest were the least, and the women who raised their heads and their children were even less? This news did not come from us.

I would have been happy to strain my arms in a work field next to my father, or sweep the floors of a hundred houses if it helped my mother. That was who we were, this is what did.

I don’t know if my memory is real, or if this is something I read in a book.

We lived in a place of zesty skies and lime shadows. I think this is a real thing, but I don’t remember.

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Vanity and legend

I have been looking for the moral code of the universe for a long time, and I have discovered that there is none. We are all rolling like hogs off a cliff.

Now, a man like Cándido, he will disagree with me, and he is a most agreeable soul. He will share his cigarettes and tequila, and he is a good listener. He avoids speaking nonsense, and I am often curious how his mind works. He knows my history with drink, because I am loud with it; it has become a part of my vitality and legend. “I used to be a drunk,” I will say, and you can imagine the bright lights and angels that greet that declaration. If there are angels, I further say, and if anyone gives a damn, I would weep for them.

I am one of many, one of six, and Cándido, he is our santo patrón, and I am our patron drunk. Oh, poor Luis, you may say, the drunk is the clown of the story, the clown who hides his tears in whiskey. I tell you this: save your pity and your piety, for I can be as cruel and foolish as you like, and I will still outrun your prophecies. You cannot save yourself if yourself does not demand it. A wise and judicious man told me that, and do you know what? It was me. Ha! And so I defied all expectation and defied the whiskey, because I still care a little for what is left of my soul. Did you know that in the time it takes for the rope to uncoil, it takes less time to wrap it around one’s throat?

You see? I am loud with it! Did I not tell you?

Cándido, he will sometimes share his drink with me, and it would be impolite to refuse him. I think my friend understands much about the rope, but I do not ask him. I know he would not say. He is a thoughtful man, Cándido is, perhaps more so than I.

(A work in progress)

The yellow-leafed tree

The veil between dreams

My eyes abide the blighted light
of the yellow-leafed tree.
Please set my stone here
and let us both rest.
But please stop and listen —
I know you can hear it,
the grief in my spirit,

and you see the fraying of my days,
my finite breaths
fading away.

I still lean into old memories,
away from you,
away from who
I wanted to be.

I did not expect to be loved so well.

The creational rain

I have not been so familiar with house shoes as I have been for these past seventeen days. It is impossible to walk barefoot across my kitchen without feeling unclean. The floor is sticky and gritty from the rolling, breathing rain. The water that spills from the Rio Pardo pours across the corduroy rows of the cornfield, flattens them, then churns the soil into runnels of muddy syrup.

It has been a creational rain, and I fear what it will bear. I fear the diseases that may live in that water, and I dread the chance of an unholy baptism should my children fall into it.  I worry about the cholera it may bring, and the mosquitoes it will tempt.

We are worn by the blankness of this rain. It has been a cortina that clings to our windows, and it fills my days with worry. Each day fades into another, each with the same blankness and the same worry.

We play card games, and I sing them the childhood songs I only half remember, and I try to teach them my Spanish. If the rain stops, they will forget my language, and I will forget the songs I sung to them. There is a sadness to this that hurts me throughout, this forgetting of things that will one day drown us.

This night, and every night, we will wear our shoes to bed, and we will shield our eyes with our arms, and we will listen to the rain shout at us. And perhaps we will sleep. If the rain opens all our doors, it will already be too late for us to run. 

I have not been so familiar with house shoes as I have been these past seventeen nights.

The storm

We sit cross-legged on the scatter rug and listen to the rain peck at the windows. The water fractures itself against the screen and it draws patterns I want to trace with my fingers. We have a box of candles on the kitchen table, for when the dark comes back inside. She leans into me whenever the rain turns loud, and her face is solemn and so still. Outside, the wind carves itself into the hickory trees. She can’t hear me offer up comfort, so I lean back into her. We listen. We wait.

The hemlocks

Forty years on,

she follows the path of his ghost,

a slender and thorned road

that leads to a ruined ecstasy.

Above the carpeted dirt,

she remembers the boy’s twitching mouth,

so unaccustomed to casual pleasure,

and the slow burn of tobacco between them.

The last of the afternoon light

dripped between the hemlocks

and fell upon bare shoulders.

And she, alone, still wonders

if he ever smelled the gunpowder.