Nonfiction

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.

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.

I pick all the raspberries. A ritual now, I fill the bowl. I waste a few while pulling, wait for their stains on my hands. This is unguided presence and meditation, a keeping myself, on my knees in the bush reaching for the ripe and grown. I’m getting the metaphor out early —- the hanging …