Articles

On my 9th birthday, I received a typewriter from my parents, and I started writing that day—mostly short stories about kids battling ghosts or gaining superpowers. I didn’t start writing poetry until I was in my teens. I’ve kept journals for most of my life. Over the years I have become more disciplined about writing daily. Writing has become a cathartic exercise for me.

Right now, our country faces a crisis of mass incarceration. With five percent of the world’s population, we have twenty-five percent of the world’s incarcerated people.  The majority of these are held not in the federal prison system but in local facilities—jails.

“We’re not lost,” mom said. She took a deep breath and yelled, “Desgraciado! Imprudente! Chingón!” Each insult was like the click from a bat. She located where she was by putting insults into the air and listening to the dark city echo and holler back. Eulogio was by the taxis.

Before the employee at the Museum of Shadows lets me touch the haunted doll, she makes me put on a pair of black gloves. She says it’s for my protection, that the spirit in the doll might try attaching to me. I hold the aging boy in a sailor suit, talking to him quietly, rocking him up and down slightly to watch his obedient eyelids close and open, close and open with each soft murmur.

It begins with the smallest of breaths:
a cough, a voice split into seven veins. We joke with the coolness of broader perspective, suavely side-eye our parents.

In the south the orange juice is so thick the pulp catches between my teeth. Every night my dogs chase the bunny who refuses his backyard eviction; they’re pouncing and weaving, always missing. Theirs is a dumb violence—a giddiness for the baby bird perplexed by flight, and rooted in the garden bed.

The idea had been beautiful in its simplicity: Make Guardian Angels literal by building androids for children. Train the Angels to recognize the pitch and tenor of the children’s voices, to notice the slightest changes in tension or elation. Equip them with motion sensors to monitor the children’s location and the ability to measure the space between their bodies and dangerous objects—still-hot stovetops, second-story windows, abandoned Legos poised upright on the carpet, shattered green glass in alleys. Embed the Angels with GPS and cameras to deter kidnappers. Program the Angels to never leave the children’s side.

Someone looking at the large photograph hanging on the spacious sitting room wall would imagine that there was something anomalous about it. An anomaly impossible to define at first glance, and perhaps not at second glance, yet there was no shame in continuing to look. After all, these large photographs in their carefully chosen frames hung there for everyone to look at in contemplation of their static details.

by Sarah Fawn Montgomery Dig Site  ~ San Miguel, California, 1991 What I find: a tiny wooden horse, smooth from where blade whittled wood, legs delicate as matchsticks. A golden stamp, slick replica of the ones my mother lets me lick. A tiny silver spoon with an engraving of New York State to hold in …

The Japanese fished my grandfather from the ocean. An unwanted catch, part of a shoal of broken men. Barefoot and barely dressed, they were forced to march through the streets of Macassar. Burning tarmac blistered their feet, the sun stripped salt-stained skin from their shoulders.