Articles

On the porch, we shake the dead
lightbulb day, hear broken filament
in our voices. You ask, Are you listening to me?
How can I answer—No. My silence orbits
the yard, the circling makes us suffer.

She says that beneath the microscope
lust looks just like hydrogen
building the world with weightlessness.
Above the lens, it looks like a woman
who wants to touch the sun
more than she wants to touch me.

She says that beneath the microscope
lust looks just like hydrogen
building the world with weightlessness.
Above the lens, it looks like a woman
who wants to touch the sun
more than she wants to touch me.

After my husband’s grandfather dies, I buy our three-year-old daughter “Frida Kahlo’s Frocks & Smocks,” a magnetic dress-up paper doll with clothing and accessories: monkeys and parrots, a paintbrush along with skeleton shirt and pants, onerous scarves and bracelets. Our daughter drapes these accessories in the wrong places: a bracelet on Frida’s head, her monkey gripping the paintbrush and standing by Frida’s easel, which also sports the disembodied head of Diego Rivera.

Green as Ohio’s Tea Hills, named for sassafras, a root boiled and steeped for tea; green as panes of window glass on end, green as deep basins of river water that slow but do not stop, green as shamrocks and great good fortune, green as fiddleheads, fields and falls, green, like the fuse that burns beneath the dun watercolor stain of winter.

If there was something to mention in the first sentence, to set a scene, it would be the backstreets: how they shaped the rows of houses, their geometry performed in straight lines as if you could cut them with scissors and collage them into another map. You could make a different city.

When I hear marriage mentioned, the muscle around or the muscle that is my heart stiffens. I meet couples engaged to marry, newly wed or newly coupled, and think how slender the chance for their success. I am inflexible toward remarriage, cannot think why I would ever marry again. Once upon a time I was married, then winter arrived and I moved across town, back to base level in a downstairs apartment alone, looking for the nearest grocery store, watching the weather, hoping to be surprised by how the story unfolded.

I’ve finished my shopping at the farmers’ market. My bags are filled with carrots and cucumbers, eggs and tortillas. At my last stop, the boy handed me my change for the olives and hummus, then presented me with a gift, a napkin heavy with baklava. “A sweet for the sweet,” he said, assuming his uncle’s broad stance. The baklava was my excuse to find a bench, but I’ve already eaten the whole piece and scraped its syrup from my napkin. I’m still here, sitting and savoring the market. It’s Friday evening, and this is the most beautiful spot in Los Angeles.

We were the art girls. We had charcoal under our fingernails, flecks of dried clay on our jeans, acrylic paint in our hair. The artsy seniors always lived on the second floor of McAllister Hall; it was tradition. Although our boarding school, Florence Summer Academy for Girls, was beautiful—the dorms looked like magnificent stone castles—McAllister Hall was so run-down inside that they let whoever lived on the second floor paint the walls of their rooms.

Ringing the doorbell, he arrived on a rainy night four months ago. I knew immediately who he was, for he had made a name for himself publishing scholarly papers in his country. Then he had been ejected from his land, as they all had been, and now here he was, on my doorstep.